While getting my regular saturday morning Twitter/Quibb fix, I came across this cool feature called Mozify from Email on Acid (email testing platform).
While I didn’t try it yet (though I just emailed about it to our head of marketing and the CRM manager), the idea is brilliant – and sent me back to the old BBS/Demo Scene/ANSi Scene days.
Put simply: Many people get your CRM emails without the images. We’re all experiencing this daily – getting a marketing email from a newsletter or game and it’s mostly missing images, which we need to approve the mail client to download. Most of us don’t. We just delete the email without actually knowing what was the offer about.
Here comes the idea – images requires approval for download (and rightly so). But text does not. What if we could convert an image to text? Mozify seems to be basically just that. Converting images to colored text characters.
This idea immediately threw me back to the days I ran Coders F/X BBS and to the heated debate in the ANSi scene about using Image-2-Ansi converters. Back then it was considered a desecration of the art.
As BBSes died and the world wide web surfaced, the ANSi Art vanished as a real tool and mostly became part of the underground scene history. Just another subculture you can read about in Wikipedia or hear from people that are 40+ years old. That’s why it was so interesting to me to see how solutions from the past resurface today to confront a real nowadays issue.
Regardless if we’ll end up using this feature or not for CRM, it’s still a great idea. Well done, Email on Acid.
Also, I just got to know if they actually intended, or were aware, ACiD is also the name of the biggest ANSi art team that was back then? (This is a Pinboard with some of their creations)
Resources:
Video
“Art Scene” – BBS The Documentary (YouTube)
GETV: ANSI Art for the Masses
Introduction
ANSi Art on Pinterst (Pintrest)
Images to ANSI art convertor
Fun on the terminal – Create Ascii art and ansi art – post with many plugins, examples and how-to
Code
Escapes.js by Ori Livneh (@scatterblot) – small JavaScript library for rendering ANSI art
AnsiLove project including an ansi 2 pic .js source code
ansi.js – Advanced ANSI formatting tool for Node.js
Ansize: Binary ANSI Art in the Terminal – Convert images to binary ANSI art
