After 20+ years since I worked as a designer at Teletext, Ladbrokes (and a little bit of Sky Text) I have returned to the technology, swapping horses and palm trees, planes and boats for pop culture and retro icons. Now I wish that I had appreciated Teletext more at the time, but, since the summer of 2016 I have been producing image after image, in fact now almost 2500 images which you can see here at Horsenburger's Teletext Art.
So if you are into 3-bit pixel art, nostalgia or just fancy something different, then this is the site for you.
If you would like to support me there are details at the bottom of this page or you could buy some of my exclusive merch at www.horsenburger.shop.
I could not have created this artwork with out the brilliant talented people that recreated the Teletext software, so if you would like to have a go at teletext yourself visit zxnet or edit.tf.
I've started to draw again after almost 35 years, I hope you like them as much as I enjoy doing them.
It's me, Steve Horsley ‘aka’ Horsenburger. I currently reside in the beautiful county of Devon, United Kingdom and in my spare time I make teletext art.
So, let’s go back in time to 1995 when it all started. For there is where I started working with teletext systems for Ladbrokes (so many horses and footballs), I then moved on to work for Teletext Ltd and was very privileged to work occasionally with my bestest friend from school, Paul Rose ‘aka’ Mr Biffo.
My experience at Teletext pretty much swapping horses for palm trees, planes and boats. I then continued to work in teletext for an advertising agency, slowly moving into website design and IT development before drifting away from it totally as it became obsolete.
I wish I had appreciated doing teletext much more at the time, but hey, at least I'm making up for it now and since 2016 I've produced well over 2000 images for fun and commissions.
The resurgence of interest and nostalgia in teletext in the UK over the past few years has been great, I've taken part in Digifest, teletext block parties, and Demo parties, I've also become a contributor to the textmode groups Mistigris and Blocktronics, I've been the artist in residence for Ardtext and helped create the infamous 'Worms' April Fools Jokes for Team 17.
You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @Horsenburger and I have a load more links you can find here on my Linktree - Horsenburger | Linktree
These images below are created using anything from 2 to 8 individual teletext screens.
Making these large teletext images all started at Nova 17 when Simon Rawles and myself decided to do something a little more challenging than usual using the edit.tf system. Simon modified the editor in one afternoon to allowed me to work on a ever expanding canvas.
Over the next 4 hours (including debugging) I produced the 'Dragon and Castle' image, this was a monster 39 x 200 sixels (a standard page is 39 x 23 sixels). Obviously this screen cannot be displayed on a standard TV but it does comply with the specification of Teletext and was displayed as 8 separate screens.
Sadly that version of the editor was only functional for one day, now create multiple separate screens and combine them to produce one large image.
Here is a selection of these special teletext images.
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Do you want your own unique profile image, lovingly handcrafted with the finest 40-year-old technology? If you do, please visit my commissions page on ko-fi.com
Over the years I have been asked if I ever have made 'naughty' teletext images, which I hadn't, but, knowing there is an interest in this subject (as any web search will show) I decided to create a small gallery of designs.
Even though they are 8 colour blocky pixels, they are still NSFW so I keep them password protected. If you want access please support me on Patreon/Ko-Fi and message me for access.
