BrideBlog – Advice from a Recent Bride

Fonts & Dingbats – Your DIY Friends

October 18th, 2006

If you are DYIing your own paper products, chances are you want to use a font that is slightly more elegant than say Times New Roman. Fortunately for DIY brides, beautiful free fonts abound on the web! Here are some of my favorite sources:

http://www.dafont.com/

http://www.fontfreak.com/

http://www.houseoflime.com/

http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts-e3.html

http://www.specialtyfonts.com/deco/index.htm

http://www.listemageren.dk/fontarkiv/index.htm 

How to Install on a PC computer

Fonts generally come in zip files. Download the zip file to your computer and unzip the folder. Do not directly unzip the contents (which is usually a TTF file and another text read me document) into your Windows/Fonts folder.  Unzip it somewhere into your documents and then navigate to that location. Click once on your font and then copy or move the font into your C:/Windows/Fonts folder. Your computer should pop up a dialogue box showing that its installing the font. It will say installing one of one and the font name. 

Thats it! Now open any program that uses fonts such as MS Word and you’ll see your new font in the list.

Dingbats & Webdings

Dingbats and Webdings are fonts that are not letters but rather collections of symbols or graphics usually based around a theme. The beauty of these little guys is that because fonts are inherently “vector” art they can be sized up to any dimension without losing quality or pixelating like say a jpg will.

You won’t have any trouble sizing dingbats to the appropriate resolution on your maps or invitations but you WILL have a problem if you find an image you like on the web and and decide it makes the perfect motif for your invitations. It will look fine on your screen, but when you go to print it, it will look fuzzy. This is because web graphics are 72 dots per inch (or DPI) where as printing requires a much higher resolution image, usually 300dpi.

So, for example if you decide you want a starfish as a motif for your beach-themed wedding, you are MUCH better off searching for a dingbat you can install on your computer than if you found a cute jpg of a dingbat by doing a google image search. Part of the reason is the resolution, but also because your google image starfish will most likely have a white or colored background which will prevent you from layering it over anything but the same color white.

Dingbats can be used for many different things from flourishes and motifs, to background design elements and map symbols.

Finally, Some Examples!

Here are a few different versions of a monogram/logo I did for a beach-themed wedding:

Obviously the big “W” is an alphabet font, but the starfish, Flip Flops and Hibiscus Flower were all symbols from a dingbat font called “Tropicana BV” available for download at Dafont.com: http://www.dafont.com/tropicana-bv.font

Here is a jpg of the front of my map insert:

And the back:

Every little graphic in this map insert is a dingbat font including the buildings, the plane symbol, the flourishes in between the hotel names and even the frame around our names!

Dingbat fonts as overlays..

One other example of how you can use a font to add a design element is by making it very large and low opacity like I did in our invitation design:

The bright white lily in the bottom left is a jpg, but the floral motif is from a beautiful set of floral fonts called “in my garden” also available at dafont.com: http://www.dafont.com/in-my-garden.font

There are, of course, hundreds of examples and it would take hours to go through all of them, but please feel free to post specific questions if you have any!

 

Entry Filed under: DIY, Tips