ASCII – American Standard Code for Information Interchange – Fashion in Grafic Design

I take up this topic and the ASCII Adcampaign of Sixt car rental company today because of our own plans to use it as a design tool for the new header of our blog (coming soon), ASCII files mimicking words and words and words raining on the biestmilch universe.
I thought it makes sense to have look at the original meaning of ASCII. Many of us are using this abbreviation, at least in Gemany without having a clue of what it means. Here is the clue for those who are as ignorant as I am 😉 !

ASCII stand for »American Standard Code for Information Interchange«, pronounced /ˈæski/. It is a character-encoding scheme based on the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text. Most modern character-encoding schemes—which support many more characters than did the original—have a historical basis in ASCII.
Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters.
ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing, mostly-obsolete control characters that affect how text is processed. 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The ASCII character-encoding scheme is the most-commonly-used character set on the Internet.

Ours would have been words and words and words raining on our

Source: Advertising Lab; animated version here.

In case we use the ASCII header at least we have some more awareness of its roots.