MFT: Celebrating MindVox ASCII Banner

Of all the things you can find on the internet - bizarre promotional typographic constructions are among the ones that also always manage to occupy a special place in my heart even though there is nothing special about them even if you lower your standards of specialness low enough for them to qualify.  

The reason for that is simple - they are easy to play with through various text manipulation and transformation applications. That's the thing with ASCII stuff - it is fun to mess with. 

Case in point - MindVox ASCII Banner. The startup was founded in late 1991 by two former members of Legion of Doom hacker group - Bruce Fancher AKA Dead Lord and Patrick Kroupa AKA Lord Digital. It was an Internet Service Provider of a new kind - the one free of corporate shenanigans (something that is becoming increasingly timely right now when the notion that corporations and their grip on the internet is detrimental to the very essence of the world wide web became obvious even to the most casual users). By the mid-90's the service was shut down, probably because it was way ahead of its time and there was not enough momentum to sustain it on a proper level.

Nevertheless, their legacy lives on. And they left a fancy banner for me to screw with. While it is not really a piece of sophisticated artistry, there is a weird charm to this logo, the way the characters are arranged and formatted. 

Takes a look:


         /\_-\
        <((_))>
         \- \/
 /\_-\(:::::::::)/\_-\
<((_))  MindVox  ((_))>
 \- \/(:::::::::)\- \/
         /\_-\
        <((_))>
         \- \/

There are slashes left and right, underscores, dashes, dashes, dashes, colons, colons, colons, brackers, less-than sign, more-than sign and the name of the company "MindVox" right in the middle of all this. Also - the whole thing is manually centered to compose an image. There are whole lotta spaces involved in this unthankful operation. 

While you play with those things long enough (and you do because it is rather time consuming exercise in wasting time) - after a while (a long-long while) you can get some really unexpected things out of it. You can even get some sweet conceptual poetry out of it, if you waste your time hard enough. But it is fun to mess with it just for the sake of it.