dingbats – 2nd attempt at images

No, I’m not being rude to you.  Dingbats are me latest fun technique to collect and use on the computer.  For those of you not familiar with dingbats, it is the name for fonts which create symbols instead of letters.  For instance in arial I get a b c   but in the dingbat font called

This variety is one of the things that I love – dancers to dinosaurs with everything else in between like clock hands ( timeface),  StarWars characters (forced reentry) and coffee cup stains (cafeina).
Another reason that I like them is that once the fonts are loaded they are available in all programmes I use –  word (and the rest of Microsoft suite); livewriter; picasa and photoshop elements.  Loading is easy – for instructions try here.

All of these fonts are free to download.  I tend to use dafont,  urbanfonts and dingbatdepot mostly.  WARNING browsing through dingbat font sites can eat up time (I speak from experience).

As well as the three above, recent favourites (the ones on yesterday’s layout) are

Recently I have used them to create a digi pattern strip on this layout about feeding parrots.  I use the dancing people on my weekly collage of photos.  Last year I used the StarWars dings (forced re entry) along with quotes to create cards for my nephews.

I also used the running N circles ‘c’ to create some background paper and elements for a digi minikit that you’ll see here on 1st of June.  I find dingbats easier to use than shapes in Photoshop word because the text tool keeps then in a straight line and evenly spaced.

The wonders of photoshop elements also means I can use dingbats to jazz up a brontosaurus! (paper by Spencer in with love kit from Design House Digital)