Thank You Joan Stark

10 August 2026

I wanted to take a brief moment to thank Joan G Stark and give her the credit she deserves for her contributions to the arcade.ly site header.

Joan is a prolific ASCII artist who was very active in the early years of the web - from what I can find starting around 1996, and then up until roughly 2004. She’s been and remains hugely influential within the internet ASCII art community and is still popular to this day.

Whilst her original website(s) are long since offline, you can still find her work at:

There are lots of different styles of ASCII art and, more generally, character art, and a ton of sites dedicated to ASCII and character art. These warrant a post in their own right, and maybe one day I’ll do that.

But I wanted specifically to talk about Joan here because her style of ASCII art fits very well with the kind of aesthetic I am aiming for with this site.

The basic arcade.ly logo hasn’t changed much since 2015 or 2017, whenever I first put the site online. I used an online text to ASCII art font generator to create the logo, which gave me this:

                                 .___     .__
_____ _______   ____ _____     __| _/____ |  | ___.__.
\__  \\_  __ \_/ ___\\__  \   / __ |/ __ \|  |<   |  |
 / __ \|  | \/\  \___ / __ \_/ /_/ \  ___/|  |_\___  |
(____  /__|    \___  >____  /\____ |\___  >____/ ____|
     \/            \/     \/      \/    \/     \/

I was pretty happy with this and added a blue to green gradient that was inspired by the blue/green reflective text in the Ultimate Play the Game logo from the 1980s.

I did experiment with a pure ASCII art version of this logo on the website but I was getting frustrated with wrangling CSS, so in the end I grabbed an old Netflix template from GitHub and used that for a long time, along with a Hexo blog.

But I was never really happy with either so recently I’ve spent some time retheming the site. It’s taken longer than I’d like to get it looking the way I want it to. Being a hacker who grew up in a certain era that means a sort of hyperreal neon-soaked 1980s terminal interface pastiche (obviously). It goes with the vector games I’ve so far built. But, also, Miami Vice remains one of my favourite TV shows. I’ve always loved the way that show was lit, and many of the interior designs (particularly after dark). Cowboy Bebop and Firefly are also influences. Anything that’s set in the future but a lot of the technology is kind of antique I really enjoy.

I wanted to do more with the logo and header and I’d recently stumbled across Joan’s ASCII art gallery site via Parimal Satyal’s fun piece on Rediscovering the Small Web.

Joan’s art style fits really well with the kind of neon vibe I’m going for here because she’s quite economical. She avoids dense character fills and in favour of emphasizing outlines and contours.

She also mostly presented her work in white on black which is, (a) a great starting point given the background colours used here, and (b) makes it easy to experiment with adding my own colours to see how that looks.

So I’ve used a couple of her beach scenes from https://web.archive.org/web/20010501170149/http://www.geocities.com/spunk1111/nature.htm#beach, and have adapted them slightly for use in my header.

The first thing I wanted was some palm leaves or palm trees. I started down the leaves route, but I was struggling to either make or to find decent looking palm leaves that would fit in the space I had available. However, I really like this beach scene from Joan:

           |
         \ _ /
       -= (_) =-
         /   \         _\/_
           |           //o\  _\/_
    _____ _ __ __ ____ _ | __/o\\ _
  =-=-_-__=_-= _=_=-=_,-'|"'""-|-,_
   =- _=-=- -_=-=_,-"          |
 jgs =- =- -=.--"

I think the palm trees work well and I like the sand dune, so I wanted to keep both aspects. The water and the sun also look good, but I have a water effect - with reflections and ripples (Firefox compatible, no less!) - already, and the header scene is meant to be at night, so I removed both.

This gave me:

          _\/_
          //o\  _\/_
            |   /o\\ 
        _,-'|"'""-|-,_
    _,-"          |
.--"

From there I’ve made a couple more tweaks (added a bit more dune, added a couple more pieces of beach grass), and I’ve used that tweaked version, plus its reflection, to frame the main logo. I’ve also added colours, which I think work pretty well, and I’ve made the palm leaves occasionally wave a little bit in the breeze.

Then I wanted some twinkling stars and maybe the moon, so I turned to another one of Joan’s beach scenes. In this case a night-time scene:

            *      .         .                   .
    .                                      *         .         *
                      *            *           .-.
        *        *         .                  ( (       * 
                    .                   *      '-'
  ,\//,.\//\/.         ,\/,   ,\/.//,                       .
  //o\\/o//o\\ ,.,.,   //o\   /o\\o\\         *     .      
    |   |  |  /###/#\    |     |  |      .                 *
    |   |  |  |' '|:|    |`=.='|  |                      
jgs^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^""""""""""~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a lot I like about this - the hammock is a particularly fun detail - but I just needed the moon and some stars so I trimmed down to a couple of chunks for the left- and right-hand sides of the header:

Left:

            *      .         .
    .
                      *
        *        * 
                    .

Right:

                   .
             *         .
     *           .-.
                ( (       * 
          *      '-'

Again, I’ve made a couple of additional tweaks from there, repositioning some of the stars, adding colours, and implementing some twinkling, but this is very much a jgs creation.

I also added a sort of dimming/sparking neon effect on mouse cursor that I’m 100% sure almost nobody will notice - but I like it - and that gave me my finished header.

And now, having got it all working - and taking into account the reduced motion preference, where set - I “just” need to optimise the performance.

Thanks again Joan!

Postscript: Where is Joan now?

I don’t know. Not really.

Joan and her work were still referenced in the FAQ of the alt.ascii-art newsgroup until at least 2023. The 2023 date might simply coincide with when Google stopped archiving usenet posts, so I’d bet she’s still referenced in the FAQ today, in 2026.

Back in 2013 somebody in the same group said that she still posted ASCII art from time to time - whether that was to her website, to the group, or both isn’t clear to me. With that being said, her most recent activity that I’ve been able to find dates from 2004, and I haven’t been able to find anything later than that.

So it looks like she’s been mostly quiet online for more than 20 years. Both her Wikipedia article and her website talk about her children, who will all be grown by now, but there’s no more recent information.

Sometimes people have enough of being online, and that’s fine. I like to think that Joan is living and enjoying her life, and I’m grateful that we all still get to enjoy her art.

Filed Under

Category:Musings

Tags:ascii-art · logo · jgs · citation

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