The Whimbats
Learn more about Typephases exclusive collection of people illustration fonts.
Whimbats? What are they?
The TypePhases’ home made speciality, the Whimbats, include nearly one thousand spot illustrations of people in the most diverse, wild and crazy situations. Several of them are available as freeware for personal use, while the rest can be ordered exclusively in our store.
The Whimbats are grouped in three-font sets called Illustries, Whimsies, Ombres, Absurdies, Bizarries and Genteta, plus other single-file fonts like Bruegheliana, The Joy of Reading and the Collbats. The total number of files is twenty. You can see detailed samples of all of them in our Specimen Book and the Serving Suggestions page displays some designs that use them.
These images can be combined to create new situations and illustrate the funniest and weirdest stories. The digital font format is very flexible and makes it possible to use the illustrations in any program. And yet it’s easy to customize them for a specific purpose. With the many pictures in our Whimbats series you can illustrate a book collection, a magazine for months, dozens of articles or brochures, hundreds of posters or flyers...
The advantages of dingbats
The scalable font file format of the dingbats means that they can be resized without any loss of clarity. Type it directly into your document at any size. Then you can easily customize it to your needs. The images will print crisply on any inkjet or laser printer, with independence of their physical dimensions.
Our notebook includes several articles that will help you use the Whimbats creatively. Don’t miss them out, especially the detailed article about using dingbats, with many tips and tricks!
The themes and style
The source of inspiration for the Whimbats is one’s own imagination. Only a handful of the Whimbats are based on old time photographies. And certainly, their visual style owes much to the Victorian era editorial illustration and the graphic design in the sixties, Milton Glaser and a healthy overdose of comic books when I was a child and teenager. There is also a definite influence of some cartoonists little known abroad, such as Chummy Chumez and Ops (aka El Roto), always prone to the blackest humour.
A companion article explains how the Whimbats are drawn and how they become digitized files.
So, where do the Whimbats come from? I have no plans when I start drawing, but sometimes I find out that some characters in a collection colud be combined with those in a different font. For example, the funny old-fashioned villains (complete with eye mask and swag bag) show up again and again. There are also some thematic packages. For example, there are two sets called The Joy of Reading that gather people enjoying the world of books, with most of the illustration coming from a project for a Regional Library network.
