Dingbat fonts
The many advantages of dingbat fonts and vectorial artwork.
Dingbats are vector drawings encapsulated as a font file (truetype or type 1). They share the advantages of vector objects, and they even have some more:
- They are ready to use in any program you have and in any operating system. No compatibility or version issues.
- They can be scaled to any size with no loss of quality.
- They can be easily converted to outlines (vector shapes.)
- Easy to crop, combine, break apart...
- There are many themes to choose, covering every imaginable topic.
- They have a modest file size even if each dingbat font will contain a group of pictures (up to 256, though the normal number is 26 to 100). This makes the dingbats a very handy source of clipart.
- Very easy to organize and use.
At the bottom of this page you will find some illustrated examples and tips about dingbat usage.
What you need
You can install, uninstall and manage the dingbats just like any other font in your system. Check the font management article for an in-depth coverage of this topic.
To access the images contained in a dingbat, obviously you need a font management program, or simply the character map utility in your system. Otherwise, you will have to type until you find the necessary image! You can create a template for the character set in any font, using your favourite word processor or spreadsheet. Just type the whole character set arranged in any fashion you like, then select all and change the font to the one you want to make a printout. A printed specimen, produced from a type manager or from any application, will provide a convenient reference sheet to find quickly the images you need.
Themes and styles
Dingbats come in any imaginable flavour and style! From very simple icons to artistic drawings, painstakingly transferred to vector shapes, from funny to scientific, utilitarian to crazy, mundane to esoteric, universal to idiosyncratic.
Typephases’ original dingbats, the Whimbats and other, such as the Antypepatics and Lletraparits, Feedback and the Fazzes and Deskspace series, include more than a thousand illustrations that cover every theme you can come up with.
How to use them. Some ideas
Here follows a list of things to explore with your picture fonts. See also the Whimbats articles for more tips.
- Combine them with a touch of colour, a fill in bitmap mode such as a texture, a gradient, a shadow...
- Convert to outlines, break the shapes apart and fill them in any colour combination you like.
- Create more organic art using textures and some special effects such as emboss, distortion, 3D manipulation... take extra care with some of these "fx" because they tend to be on the tacky side.
- Create logotypes the easy way.
- Illustrate a book or an article. Since the dingbats usually come parcelled in themes, you have a very easy to find and use collection of illustrations.
- Create icons.
Practical tips and tricks
And finally, some practical illustrated hints about utilizing dingbats in your designs:
You can transform them without limits: enlarge them to any size, stretch them, rotate them, skew them... the images will not appear jaggy. They will print crisply after any transformation.
You don't need to use whole images supplied in a dingbat font. It's very easy to crop out a detail from an enlarged character.
Why not enrich the dingbats with some carefully selected textures? For more complex effects, you can paste textures or other images inside the shapes or a selection of them, make a duplicate on top and fill it with a different colour or texture, then make it partially transparent. There are infinite options to create your illustrations with the Typephases Dingbats.
Ungroup or group them. You can select parts of a character and combine them with parts of another, even from another dingbat, reorder them ans scale them as you want. With the Typephases Whimbats you could illustrate a whole village, a market, a factory, a manicomy (especially this one!) full of people and stories. There are infinite combinations and stories to discover within the Whimbats community!
A little touch of colour, or a fully coloured illustration can give the dingbats a new life and impact. You can colour the dingbats using your favourite bitmap or vector application. There is a variety of colorizing techniques for bitmap programs. In an illustration program, you can either:
- Place coloured shapes behind the dingbat characer.
- Convert the character to shapes, ungroup and decompose to get all the paths that make up each symbol. Then select them one by one or several at a time to apply colour, gradients, textures...
Plugin filters in a painting application are a powerful and easy way to spice up this clipart, and you can get many interesting effects.
Most painting programs include a variety of special effects filters, with presets and controls, to alter the image in some incredible ways at the push of a button. Then you can add new plugins to expand your arsenal of quick effects. Some of these plugins are free, while other are commercial. For example, the Unplugged Effects suite, compatible with PaintShop Pro 4+ and Photoshop, includes a huge collection of effects with colour and shapes. This is one of my favourites and it's freeware.
Of course you can run multiple filters and transformations in a given image, obtaining the wildest variations you could imagine. Try not to overproduce the illustration. In graphic design often less is more! There is an infinite variety of illustration styles that you can bring out just with the dingbats and your painting program!
And last, but not least: the dingbats are ideal to create Flash movies. Experiment with the dingbats. They will not complain! Once the font is installed you have the option to manipulate them in your favourite drawing or painting program to get them to work for any project.
