ASCII art – art made using keyboard characters, especially those from the ASCII character set – has been around since 1966, making it just younger than ASCII itself. Cats, video game sprites, and custom logotypes have always been popular subjects, but I have never seen maps made with ASCII. So I decided to do it myself.
At first, I tried to create each of the conterminous 48 United States by using the first letter of the state’s name. The layout of the states makes that impractical, though, so I changed New Jersey to J and Illinois to L. Then I realized that N, M, and W looked too much alike, making large blocks like Wyoming-Montana and Minnesota-Wisconsin-Michigan impractical, so further substitutions had to be made. After a handful of character swaps (which could easily be decoded), Massachusetts was converted to % by hand, to keep it from interfering with Maine.
Believe it or not, this was done in Adobe Illustrator using the Courier font. Setting a character-width grid made it easy to visualize the raster layout. Rather than make my own, I downloaded a colored map from the web and traced over it.
Data Sources: Google image search
Projection: unknown, but looks like a conic projection
Tools: Adobe Illustrator