Block glyphs: a photo rebuilt from shaded Unicode blocks
Block glyphs draws your image with four Unicode shade characters, from the solid full block in the brightest cells through the dark and medium shades down to the light, dotted one. Because those glyphs fill nearly their whole cell, the result looks like chunky pixel art with a texture inside each pixel, colored from the photo and pushed by Color contrast at 100. Darker regions stay open over the blurred backdrop, so blossoms like the coral petals in the preview stand lit against a dim field of their own color.
Make it yours
Go coarser for a poster
At Cell size 11 the blocks are small enough to hold petals and edges. Try 20 or more for big, graphic squares that read from across a room, or 6 for a fine texture that almost passes for a photograph.
Let the photo shine through
Lower Glyph opacity to around 60 and the blocks become translucent, so the blurred image glows through every shade character and the whole piece takes on a softer, screen-printed feel.
FAQ
Which characters does Block glyphs use?
Four characters from the Unicode block elements range: the full block plus the dark, medium and light shades. Each cell picks one by brightness, solid for highlights and the lightest for the dimmest cells still drawn, then takes the photo's color at that spot, so tone comes from glyph density and hue from the fill.
How it works
Upload an image
Add a PNG, JPG or WebP up to 20 MB, or start from a sample photo, and keep the original ratio or crop to 1:1, 4:5, 3:2, 16:9 or 9:16.
Choose a style
Photo art draws with 8 glyph styles such as Characters, Blocks, Braille and Mixed glyphs; ASCII offers 8 character sets including Matrix, Binary and your own characters.
Style and use it
Add glyph glow, an RGB split, scanlines or bloom, then sign in with a free UX Pilot account to use it on the canvas or export it.