· Martin Michaelsen
A personal touch in a world of AI replies
An email signature made only of text characters: a tiny generative artwork, new for every email.
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with email signatures, as they generally clutter up a thread. But in this world of AI replies, I felt I wanted a little bit of a personal touch, and a way to signify that when I send an email through my studio, we care about the details. I also wanted to start moving a little bit toward the aesthetic that is authentically me, which is a little bit more old-school computer terminal, ASCII-inspired.
Where it started: NFO files
The starting point was the magic of the amazing art produced by the ASCII art creators for the demo scene, and for “Linux ISOs”. Every release came with an NFO file, a plain text file that was also a small piece of graphic design: logos, shaded blocks, dotted rails between sections.
I tried a signature like this once, but the generation time on creating an image badge signature was quite slow. So I wanted to see what I could do with just text characters.
The first round was all about real NFOs: dividers, shading and little ornaments, pulled from NFO archives. Then I noticed we were over-indexing on, like, old NFO stuff. What I actually wanted was in a note I wrote along the way: “The point is to be able to make a generative kind of little artwork that’s unique to the individual email without text, just the odd piece itself.”
And a little later: “Braille and the two-line thing could be interesting.”
Braille as a tiny screen
A Braille character is a grid of 2 by 4 dots, and Unicode has a character for every one of the 256 combinations. So any small black-and-white picture can be cut into 2×4 blocks, and each block becomes one character. The art in my signature is a short line of plain text. It’s not an image, so there is nothing to attach, load or block.
Getting it to look right took more work than generating it. With normal spacing, there is a visible gap between characters, so a circle breaks into columns. The fix was to choose the font and tighten the letter-spacing until every dot sits on one even square grid. On a Mac, that means Menlo, which falls back to a solid 8-dot Braille font. After that, circles finally came out round instead of egg-shaped.
The final style is called open field. Two invisible centres sit in a small square of dots. Rings spread out from each centre at a fixed spacing, and every dot belongs to whichever centre is nearest. Where the two ring systems meet, they interfere and make the pattern. Each email gets a new random six-character code, and that code is the seed, so every signature is different, and any one of them can be drawn again from its code.
The code has 16.7 million possible values. The drawings repeat sooner: the square is only 16 by 16 dots, and in a test of 200,000 codes I found about 35,000 different patterns, many of them a few dots apart. So the code is what makes each signature unique, and the drawing is what makes it nice to look at.
What I tried along the way
I tried a bunch of different things until we finally landed on open field. Zone plates, rings that swell and thin, spirals, fake engraving, and a lot of seeds for each.
First, I saw the initial experiments with the Braille characters, and I was intrigued. Using Tweakpane was key. I was able to dial in the settings to create a range of seed options and parameters that make aesthetically pleasing options each time.
Tweakpane is a small control panel for web prototypes. Mine had sliders for the seed, size, zoom and spacing, next to a wall of variations and a preview of the signature inside a desktop and a phone email.
I started out by defaulting to a more horizontally expansive layout, which I ultimately dropped in favor of the email signature needing to be extremely compact to not clutter up a thread. The art now sits beside two short lines of text, and the whole signature went from about 128 pixels tall to 58.
Every email gets its own. Here are four, enlarged. In the email, each one is 24 pixels tall.
What’s still open
Braille characters are drawn by the recipient’s fonts. On a Mac they render the way I designed them in my previews, but I haven’t pasted the signature into every mail app yet, Outlook on Windows least of all, and some mail apps strip the letter-spacing that holds the dots on their grid. The place in the signature comes from my internet connection, which sometimes puts me in the wrong town.
This whole project, which I spent way too much time on because I’m not sure of the actual impact, is just me indulging in my personal interests, and it gives me joy to see the result.
