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Side project · Animation · 2025

The Ascii Experiment.

A fun side-project exploring motion through pure characters — no pixels, no shading, just letters, numbers, and punctuation behaving like a moving image. Six small experiments, each one looking for a different kind of life inside a monospace grid.

Role
Solo experiment
Discipline
Animation
Year
2025
Pieces
Six loops
The Ascii Experiment โ€” main loop

About the project

A weekend that turned into six loops.

This started as a dare to myself: how much expression can you squeeze out of a 12-character monospace alphabet? No imagery, no colour, no anti-aliasing — just the rhythm of characters shifting in place.

Each loop sits inside the same constraints. Same character set, same canvas, same loop length. The only thing changing is the idea. One feels like rain. Another feels like static. A third feels like a heartbeat.

Nothing was briefed, nothing was billed. The whole point was to make work that didn’t have to be useful — and in doing that, find a few moves that are useful for the rest of the work.

Why bother

Side projects keep the main work honest.

Most of the rules I trust in client work came from things like this — small experiments where there was nothing to lose. A character-set is a constraint you can’t bluff your way out of; either the motion sells the idea or it doesn’t.

A few of the timing curves and pacing choices in here ended up quietly turning into design tokens elsewhere. That’s usually how it goes — the unsupervised work shows up in the supervised work months later.

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