Hugi Ascii file_id.diz Compo
I'm here to write something about the entries to the 1st part of the Hugi ascii compo - making dizes for the 19th issue of it. Ok, all my thoughts about all the participants one can see below. The average quality of all works is not that good, maybe because not so many qualified and experienced artists took part in the compo. I hope next time such kind of compo is held, many of them will take a glance at it and make a picture for it. Btw, only a few works have some place planned for the hugi stuff info. Where should the packer of the diskmag put some short information? Yes, next time think about it.
cxc01.diz: The face looks good and funny, but only this. I think it's got insufficient shadings, though it's not too symmetric and it is done well. When a picture is symmetric, an artist only makes half of the work. The nose is too big and the mouth is too small. It makes the face look weird.
cxc02.diz: The font shown on this picture is the way too simple. It was quite an easy work to make this: you make a rectangle, remove some of its inside and get the current font. I don't like it. The shading is too simple as well. Finally, the letter 'i' looks very different from the other three letters, and this is very bad. I think the picture was made in 5 minutes, 4 of which took the work of writing the text and placing points under the logo.
digi01.diz: This work is a bit original. I bet not everyone can understand it. First of all the large letter 'H' can catch the eye. And the letter is good, though it does not match the style of the whole picture. The rest of the pic is made out of thin lines and looks pretty strange. If you look more attentively, you can find all three letters 'ugi' near the large letter 'H'. All of them are in one style, it makes a good impression. But too much place has been left empty in the upper-central part of the picture, it could have been left for some info which is often found in the diz-file. In short, the work has good design and almost perfect antialiasing, though it's got some empty-like places.
kokki01.diz: This one looks kind of professional. One of the best, I suppose. The antialiasing isn't that good, but it gives the work some little charm. The letters look like made out of wood - serrated and hooked. The only thing I don't like in this work is the narrow range of characters which the artists has used. The down of the letter 'u' would be far more smooth, if more upper-covering chars were used (i mean - ` ' ^ " ). he used only one of them. The work is still the one most prefered by me (except my own ascii-s ;).
loston01.diz: The truth is: good work never comes alone. The previous piece of art is followed by another, though a bit less admirable. First of all, the font is unreadable. At least, the two first letters. The second thing: I can't understand is why he uses constructions like 'point over low-registered s'. This is kind of unusual and needless. If an 's' is small, then it leaves lots of space over itself... btw, the letters 'u' and 'g' were supposed (I bet) to lie on one line (exactly, the letter 'u' and the left column of the letter 'g'), but they don't. And the last thing I don't like in any work which is trying to be the best is that he painted 'huGi', in place of 'HUGI', 'hugi' or at least 'Hugi'. The same thing, I want to mention, applies to the preceding ascii. I hate this thing in any work, whether it's ascii, ansi, hirez or whatever.
mad01.diz: It was a good idea. But it looks ghastly. The letters are different in everything: size, shape... When you're going to paint something unusual, you'd better first draw it on a scrap of paper, then transfer it to the screen. And when you don't, such kind of ascii appears. The background is bad, better to say it is absent. I won't even talk about antialiasing... The letters are really ugly. Though it looks great in comparison with some others asciis in this compo.
mctr01.diz: What? What's out there? Are those points trying to form the word 'hugi'? I can't read it. It's neither oldschool nor newschool. It's a brand new kind of painting - unreadschool. If you find anything in this ascii, you must write it to me and explain what I missed. I don't like this work. There's nothing in it.
mctr02.diz and mctr03.diz: I combined these two works because it's only one work. The font is unreadable, shapeless, rough, painted with the '#'-sign, which makes it even uglier. It's a shame to show such a work, even if you're a beginner. Btw, the background of the second masterpiece is horrible. Never do it again - use / and \ for the background, if you don't know how to use them. And, the final thing, the only text in both of these works is something about the author. It's way too conceited. And the word 'design' in the signature is superfluous. Remove it next time.
msw01.diz: Usually I don't like oldschool. This time I thought the same... The letter 'g', I think, has too usual a form. And the letter 'i' is a bit weird, moreover, it's higher than any other letter. The font is too small, so the author tried to make the diz bigger by adding some points as a background. And it looks quite bad, the background could be much greater. And, for the last, the work is provided with too large an amount of unnecessary information. I mean the group. The diz is made out of thin characters, so every solid string catches the eye, because it looks like thick things. The whole composition is not too good.
ns01.diz: This ascii is original (1), hardly understandable (2) and simple (3). First it's original, because it's hard to place four letters in 20 lines making them look good and proper-sized. Btw, I liked the symbiosis of the letters 'g' and 'i'. Looks pretty good. But, again we see 'HUGi', and that doesn't make a good impression. My opinion is, when an artist can't make all letters in one style and one layout, this artist isn't as cool as he pretends to be. Of course, it would be hard to make 'gi' look the same as it does now, when painting the letter 'I' uppercased. But all in all, the picture looks pretty good. Its originality is something that makes all other drawbacks fade.
profx01.diz and profx02.diz: Ok, no entry is rejected. There's no pre-selection or something like that, otherwise I'd never let these two pictures in. It's neither ascii oldschool, nor ascii newschool. It's something really weird. The worst thing for me (that's why I don't like oldschool) is that the author has used only three characters while creating the picture. Is it good or not? It's terrible, because the picture gets monotonous, every little part of the picture looks similar to the whole ascii (like some kind of fractal). And this work (I say work, because these asciis are the same, only two or three characters were removed in the second picture) is nothing interesting, nothing to see and no time to waste on.
prst01.diz: What's this? First of all, the pic doesn't have any font. Of course, something is written above the pic, but it isn't an ascii font. The lower part of the picture is odd. What's drawn there? Is it an eye? Or is it some kind of amoeba or other unicellular creature? Anyway, it looks ugly and it should not occupy any place in the picture. Nothing good.
sk01.diz: Well... This is again a block-ascii entry. And what? No one is prohibited from participating with any school he likes. So, I want to say, this picture is something unusual. It's always hard to make a cartoon-like hero well enough when you have only 40x20 area. And this isn't an exclusion. We can see only the large lower jaw of the hero, but not the rest of his face. And the hat. The way it appears on the screen is wrong. I'd rather draw all the face and write there 'hugi' in normal letters, not like the artist did - he drew 'hugi' under the face. The font looks abnormal. It gives no art-value, and it was too easy to make it - except letter 'g', it has an interesting form and looks good compared to the rest of stuff. But i'd never call this pic one of the best only because of this letter. It's the only thing I really like in this pic.
slash01.diz: Though I've painted this picture, I like it. And I think it can be called one of the best. It's always hard to make something like this, believe me. I've spent 2.5 hours on it, but often such a small picture takes 0.5-1 hour. And I've tried to do my best... I won't write here anything about the technical side of that ascii - it isn't too polite. Just look at it and feel it.
slash02.diz: Again my work. To be honest, the font I've made in this picture isn't genious, it's a really bad font with no special features, I've not worked over the font. But the main idea of this picture was to make it something like a row of pillars, raising above everybody and everything. In my opinion, this diskmag goes the same way, it towers above any other diskmag. So, your role is to find out what is the result.
styx01.diz: In the beginning I can't say anything except this: The face is way too ugly. And I'll think twice before downloading a diskmag with such crap in the main diskmag sign - its file_id.diz file. The lines are sometimes too thick and sometimes too thin. And the nose is too big. The ears are hanging like the ones of a spaniel. Is it a person or an UFO owner who came here to read Hugi? Finally, this work does not have a real font - a second-grade schoolboy could paint such a font. If you can't make a proper font, you shouldn't show the font till the next work becomes really good. Why do I complain about all those ugly fonts? Because if the work isn't too bad, it can be ennobled with a cute fonting, and an observer could say: Ok, this man can't draw a good picture, but he draws fucking good fonts. And he'll like the pic only for its font. But if he dislikes the font, he won't look at the pic at all.
zeroic01.diz: This picture can get no good words. It does not have a unique font, the word 'hugi' is not disposed in an uncommon way, it isn't rounded, waved or whatever. Why did the painter place four balls above the word? I can't understand it, because there's no connection between the word and balls. The balls are not round because they are to be shaded, and the shading brakes the perfect shape of the circle. It's so because the shading is done with 8x16 characters, and if you want to get something rounded with such chars, you've got to make it really large, so that people don't notice that the shape is very rough. The balls suck. The only thing I like is the shaded frame near the balls. And the solid frames don't fit the picture much.
zl01.diz: Again something not really bad. Although, it's an absolutely simple picture, because only one feature of ascii-art is used - shading. The font is too easy to draw - lines are straight, use only two directions. This work contains only five characters, but it looks quite good for such a little amount of them (btw, if we don't count the chars used for shading, only two of 256 possible will be found in this picture). Finally, shading gives the work some unusuality, but still it's a bit too simple. Nothing special, I conclude.