Make your own kaomoji & ASCII art
Combine code points into expressive faces that render everywhere — no tofu, no broken boxes.
Kaomoji are Japanese emoticons read straight on, without tilting your head — faces like (｡♥‿♥｡) built entirely from standard Unicode characters. Because they’re just text, they paste anywhere and render the same on almost every device.
The building blocks
Most kaomoji share a simple anatomy: a pair of brackets for the face outline, two “eyes”, and an optional mouth or cheeks. Swap the eyes and you change the whole emotion — ‿ for a warm smile, ╥ for tears, ≧≦ for squeezed-shut delight.
- Outline: ( ), （ ）, ｛ ｝ or none at all.
- Eyes: ◕ �“ • ＾ ’ — pick a matched pair.
- Extras: arms like ╰(°▽°)╯, sparkles ✧, or animal ears ฅ.
Keeping it tofu-free
The golden rule: stick to characters with broad font coverage. Exotic combining marks can stack incorrectly or show as a “tofu” box on some systems. When in doubt, test your creation across a phone, a laptop and a browser before sharing.
From kaomoji to ASCII art
Scale the same idea up and you get ASCII art — pictures drawn from monospaced characters. Start small, keep your line widths consistent, and preview in a fixed-width font so nothing shifts.
Every face on OpenGlyph is checked for clean rendering before it’s published, and credited to the contributor who made it.