recipe-canvas-ascii / Visual craft

Semantic ASCII silhouette

Original FORM//GRAPH synthesis · design proposal

Sample a low-resolution image or video, quantize luminance into a custom glyph ramp and use semantic characters instead of generic ASCII.

Canvas 2DASCIIVideo

Where it belongs

Best when machine vision, memory, text or indexing is part of the story.

Let each project define its own glyph vocabulary; render at a stable text grid and keep a no-video seeded field fallback.

Production sequence

  1. Downsample media to a grid sized by font metrics and device capability.
  2. Calculate luminance and optional edge magnitude per cell.
  3. Map values to a curated glyph ramp containing project-native marks.
  4. Color glyphs from the sampled texture or a constrained four-token palette.
  5. Throttle to 24 fps, pause offscreen and render one deterministic frame for reduced motion.

Handoff contract

Deliverables
Canvas module + accessible text summary
Proposed runtime budget
≤ 18 KB plus media

This is a production brief, not a downloadable implementation. Budgets are proposed targets; validate them on the intended devices before release.