Fresh Hacker News | Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art

▲Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art(garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com)

126 points by california-og 13 hours ago | 15 comments

Hey, this archive you've put together is extremely impressive. How did you find all of these? Literally keyword search on digital collections?

▲california-og 1 hour ago

Thank you! It has taken me a long time. The two main methods:

1. Text content search with keywords/sentences or people's names. This is the best way, but finding good keywords is hard. 2. Randomly browsing, especially typography trade journals. Internet Archive has all issues of Inland Printer for example. Reading through them I've found many new pictures and keywords to do further searches on.

▲efitz 12 hours ago

You should look at some Arabic calligraphy- there is a lot of artistic Arabic calligraphy where passages from the Quran, poetry, and other text are written beautifully as art.

▲efitz 12 hours ago

BTW sorry for my rudeness, I find your project very cool and I love calligraphic type projects. I was so excited that I wanted to share something related to you. :-)

▲california-og 11 hours ago

Heh no worries and thanks! I love Arabic/Islamic calligraphy too, but I've had to leave out all calligraphic forms of text art (calligrammes, micrography, carmina figurata, 17th century european calligraphic art, etc..) out of the archive to keep the scope of the project focused and clear. Otherwise it would take me another 8 years :)

However, there's some arabic letterpress stuff in the archive! https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?filters=arabic I hope to find more, especially the kufic style, but I haven't found many good sources for that kind of stuff yet.

▲Aardwolf 8 hours ago

> https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

Wow this is awesome, they had box-drawing characters in 1785!

▲softgrow 11 hours ago

At school studying typing there was a class of 66 all manual typewriters except for the two electrics. If you were good and had some spare time, you were given printed instructions to type particular characters and returns. Sometimes shift into red ink. Do it properly and you got an image. So maybe pre ASCII art?

▲california-og 11 hours ago

Definitely! Take a look at these books:

—Fun with your typewriter by Madge Roemer https://archive.org/details/FunWithTypewriter/mode/thumb

—Artyping by Julius Nelson https://archive.org/details/Artyping-HQ/mode/thumb

—Typewriter Art by Alan Riddell https://archive.org/details/TypewriterArt-AlanRiddell/mode/t...

▲djmips 1 hour ago

I remember being a kid in early 80s typing class and trying to make pictures. Your archive is fantastic.

▲kevinmiller452 8 hours ago

Love this. The 18th century type specimens are gorgeous and it's amazing you pulled them from old digitized books. Do you have plans to add any interactive features like zoom on the images?

▲california-og 8 hours ago

Thank you! If you click on the images, you get a zoomable, full resolution view.

▲una_usta 10 hours ago

This is awesome! A few months ago I got a tattoo of one of the flowers from https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

I’ve been variously told it looks like the sun, a hedgehog, and a lion & I’m kind fond of all those descriptions

▲frmfrm 10 hours ago

Absolutely incredible, thank you for making this!

▲frmfrm 10 hours ago

Would love to suggest having a way to get the whole archive and metadata to browse locally or mirror, perhaps via a torrent?

▲arrowassassin 1 hour ago

Nice

▲DonHopkins 4 hours ago

So EBCDIC art?

▲mujib77 13 hours ago

Unique idea looks good

▲phyzix5761 12 hours ago

Very cool

▲faddy67 11 hours ago

damn amazing

▲roshiya 3 hours ago

[dead]

▲ 13 hours ago