Create animated ASCII art for the terminal and a GitHub README

ASCII art — pictures made entirely of characters — is enjoying a comeback with the return of command-line interfaces and polished GitHub READMEs. In this tutorial, we look at how to generate ASCII art, animate it in a terminal, then embed it cleanly in a README.

Generating ASCII art

The quickest way to turn text into large ASCII letters is the figlet tool, available on Linux, macOS and Windows (via WSL). You can pick a font and add color with lolcat.

# Text as large ASCII letters
figlet "Itamde"

# With a font and colors
figlet -f slant "Itamde" | lolcat

To start from an image instead of text, ascii-image-converter turns a logo or photo into characters, in color if needed.

ascii-image-converter logo.png -C

Animating it in the terminal

An animation is just a series of frames shown quickly. In a terminal, you clear the screen between frames and play them in sequence. Here’s a small loop that cycles through a few ASCII frames.

#!/bin/bash
frames=("(o_o)" "(o_-)" "(-_o)")
while true; do
  for f in "${frames[@]}"; do
    clear
    echo "$f"
    sleep 0.3
  done
done

For richer output, tools like chafa display images and GIFs right in the terminal, and asciinema records a whole session you can replay or publish.

Embedding it in a GitHub README

A README can’t run a terminal, so you embed a "replayable" version of the animation. The cleanest way is to record the session with asciinema, then convert it to an animated SVG with svg-term. The SVG stays light, sharp at any size and readable on GitHub.

asciinema rec demo.cast
svg-term --in demo.cast --out demo.svg --window

Then commit the file and show it in the README with Markdown:

![ASCII art demo](demo.svg)

For a simple animated banner (your name, the project title), services like readme-typing-svg generate an SVG of self-typing text, with nothing to install.

A few best practices

Add alt text for accessibility, keep files light so the page stays fast, and avoid animations that flash too quickly. Good ASCII art catches the eye without getting in the way of the rest of the README.

If special characters interest you, our ASCII, ISO and HTML code table pairs well with this topic. To go further, explore our online courses.