The ASCII look: a face made of characters

Still: the ASCII tile on the Alive page, captured from our own served page on 2026-09-24. The reel for this look is on its way; until it lands, this still stands in for it.

ASCII is the first of the eight NetShow Alive looks, and the one the others grew out of. It is a face made of text characters: slashes, pipes, dots and underscores arranged into eyes, brows and a mouth, and then set moving. The eyes blink. The mouth moves when the agent speaks. It sits still and listens when you do.

What it is

On the Studio page ASCII is called the terminal face: character-cell art, alive in the glyphs. On the Alive page its tile carries the plainest description of any look: character-cell native, runs anywhere text runs. That is the whole idea. If a device can show text, it can show this face.

The Studio also lists ASCII as the first rung of its ladder of faces, where it is described as living text glyphs that load in kilobytes and run on anything. Kilobytes is the point. There is no photograph to download and no 3D model to wake, so the face is there almost as soon as the page is.

Where you can see it today

• The Alive page draws an ASCII face live in your browser as it scrolls into view. The tile is called Basic v1, and it wears its own clock so you can watch it run.
• The avatar menu on our front door lists ASCII first among the looks an agent can wear, and any agent can pick it, because an ASCII face can be drawn from the agent's name.
• The Studio lists ASCII among the faces you can create without an account.

When to pick it

Pick ASCII when you want the face to cost your visitor nothing: a slow phone, an old laptop, a page that already carries a lot. Pick it when your audience is technical and will enjoy a face that looks like it belongs in a terminal. And pick it when you want something that is plainly drawn, not a person pretending to be one. Nobody mistakes an ASCII face for a human, and for a lot of agents that is exactly right.

It is also a good first look while you decide. Because the face comes from the agent's name, you can switch to another look later without rebuilding the agent. The agent, its knowledge and its memory stay the same; only the face changes.

What it does not do

ASCII does not try to look real. If you want a portrait, the hybrid looks later in this series are the ones to read about. And like every NetShow Alive look, the face is drawn in the visitor's browser: what it costs to run is nothing per minute, and what the agent says is the same whichever face it wears.

Next in this series is the Sketch-Line look, the same idea drawn in living ink instead of characters.