Wide's World

Dingbats

by

Widearea

Porno-Graphix

Let the dingbats do your work

Have you ever been doing a job or some menial task and thought to yourself, "When I get real big and filthy rich I will hire someone to do this shit for me..." Well, this week we'll take a look at a resource for the graphically challenged, that can make anyone crank out neato graphics for any purpose. The dingbat is a font that you can use to create instant graphics at the touch of one key. You can unearth all kinds of dingbats out there on the internet, and collecting them can be a serious hobby. Let's see what the deal is.

Interactivity is the key
1. Using dingbats is pretty easy. Just put them in your fonts folder and you're pretty much fired up. If you're on a Mac you can use a utility like Suitcase to manage fonts, etc.
2. For example, making the burst below might take a while by hand. With the dingbat called "ComicFX" it's as easy as typing Q and J into a new document.

3. Even some of your favorite characters can become icons or elements of your designs. Just be careful of those buggering copyright laws. You don't want to infringe on someone's patented artwork, logo or some such. For the most part, however, a dingbat is a dingbat is a dingbat. Caveat emptor.

Forget the tracing paper or freehand drawing, just install the old "Fred" dingbat and type D in a new window, and you have something strangely familiar.
4. With a few dingbats and your creative flare, you got yourself some adult graphics.

5. You can even dress up your dingbats. This one is "Glamocon," using the letter A.

Here, we copied the layer as a dropshadow by CTRL/COMMAND clicking on the type layer, creating a new layer, selecting Select -> Modify -> Feather and filling the feathered shape with black. Then we copied it again and rendered it down. Select Layer -> Type -> Create Shape/Render Layer (WIN/MAC) to modify it. Then we used the gradient tool to fill that copied layer with a colorful gradient and now we have dressed up our dingbat using some of the skills we have discussed in previous Wide's World issues

Dingbats are cool, and you can usually find more than you could possibly need as free downloads simply by hitting up a few search engines. They can make your work a lot easier, and they can also provide all kinds of inspiration for your icons, nav bars, advertising, title graphics and on and on. Enjoy the power that your innovation and some downloadable dingbats can do for you, at least until you can hire your own. Thanks for coming by Wide's World this week, and until next time, Happy Webmastering!

Reference/Useful Links

Dingbat Pages - "Essential" dingbats
Mike's Sketchpad Dings - Collection of free dingbats.