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Dingbats: A Mysterious Font

© Anna Morvee

Dingbats are my favorite type of font to collect and use. They are very versatile and you can do a lot with them that you can't do with clip-art. They can be used for enhancing your graphic, web design, sig tags and so much more. Their best feature is that they can be enlarged without loosing quality. If you use an image editing program like Paint Shop Pro or Photo Impact, their versatility really shines.

They are also an excellent choice if you need to make a cut-out graphic that will shine. You can also fill them in or use Blade Pro or one of many filters to give them a more personal flare.

There are a lot of sites on the Internet that have dingbats, decorative fonts and more. I've included some of my favorites in my top 5 links. Be prepared to spend many hours searching and downloading dingbats, because once you find out how versatile they are you may become addicted and find new ways to be creative!

Now for some technical info about dingbats. They are usually large in file size, so I don't recommend installing them. Also some dingbats won't work on all systems, they may lock-up your system and you may have to reboot. I've had this happen a few times, but it is nothing to get worried about. There are so many dingbats available, many are very good and some aren't. Be prepared to download a lot, then after you see quality ones end up deleting others that you may have though you must have. I'm a font-a-holic, so deleting is difficult, but after a while you'll understand what I'm talking about.

As far as using them on your system I don't recommend installing them. This is because it slows the loading time and can overwhelm your font directory. They get lost in your other fonts unless you are very organized and keep notes or notebooks on what you have installed. Also Windows has a Font Mapping utility and this makes it easy to preview and print out the characters.

This is the easiest way I've found to organize dingbats:

1. Create a new folder. You can name it what you like. Mine is just: Dingbats.

2. Create sub-folders categorizing your dingbats: Floral, Victorian, Teddy Bears and so on. When you download your dingbats they are in zip files so I usually unzip into the proper folder and then I keep the zip on a CD-ROM or Zip disk in case my computer dies.

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