Posts tagged ‘dingbats’
10 great free dingbat fonts for diecutters
Free dingbat fonts are a great source of images to use with your diecutter, but how do you know which ones cut nicely? I’ve done the trial and error for you on these ten fonts that are perfect for diecutting. Links are listed below the graphic.
1)09kutups 2)Efon 3)Board Dudes 4)Damask Dings 5)Hibiscus 6)Kalocsai Flowers 7)Peoni Patterns 8)ND Urban 9)Sepeda 10)Sewing Patterns
10 great Doodlebats for diecutters
Cool online tool for diecutters and other font lovers
If you follow this blog you know I love web apps and I am always on the lookout for new and cool ones. Mariairie left me a comment a couple of days ago with a link to IcoMoon, an icon font generator for web developers. At first I didn’t understand it or see any application for us diecutters, but the more I played the more excited I got. Here are some things you can do with IcoMoon:
Easily export all or selected glyphs in a font to individual SVG files.
- Go to Free Font Converter, browse for your font and set the “…format to convert to” to SVG and click the big blue Convert button. An SVG font with the same name as your TTF will be downloaded to your computer (SVG fonts carry the .svg extension, just like a single SVG image)
- Click the Import Icons button in IcoMoon and select the SVG font that you just generated. You will see all the glyphs from that font appear under “Your Custom Icons”
- Click on the glyphs you would like to export to SVG. Selected glyphs will be outlined in yellow. To select multiples at once, click on the first and then hold down the shift key while clicking on the last one you want to select
- Click the Images button. A zipped folder containing SVG versions of each glyph you selected will be downloaded to your computer. How cool is that?! Perfect for creating a specialized alphabet or for sorting images from a mixed theme dingbat font, among other uses we haven’t imagined yet.
Create a personal favorites dingbats font.
- Go to Free Font Converter and convert each of the source fonts to SVG as shown in step 1 above.
- Import your first font into IcoMoon as shown in step 2 above, select the glyphs you definitely do NOT want and press the trash can icon to delete them
- Repeat this process with successive fonts until all your favorite glyphs appear under “Your Custom Icons”
- Select the glyphs that make the final cut for your favorites font
- Click the Font button
- Type a character in the top box above each glyph and/or drag and drop glyphs to set their encoding (which key you will type to access each glyph)
- Click the gear/flower icon and type a name for your font in the box and click the X to save it. (choose carefully as internal font names are not easily changed)
- Click the Save button. A zipped folder containing TTF and SVG versions of the compilation font will be downloaded to your computer
Note: The key word here is personal. Use these “mix” fonts on your own computer only. Please don’t use this technique to redistribute copyrighted fonts/glyphs/images.
Make your own dingbat font.
- In Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator or other vector editor, create a set of SVGs you would like to compile into a font. (I am still experimenting with the format but starting using a 512 x 512 pixel high document seems to work.)
- In IcoMoon, click the Import Icons button and navigate to your SVGs and import them.
- Click and/or shift-click to highlight all of the SVGs which are now showing under “Your Custom Icons”
- Click the Font button
- Type a character in the top box above each glyph and/or drag and drop glyphs to set their encoding (which key you will type to access each glyph)
- Click the gear/flower icon and type a name for your font in the box and click the x to save it. (choose carefully as internal font names are not easily changed)
- Click the Save button. A zipped folder containing TTF and SVG versions of the compilation font will be downloaded to your computer
Caveat: So far I have only been able to get IcoMoon to work using Chrome as a browser.
More Doodlebats for diecutters
In my earlier post I gave ten Doodlebats I think are great for beginners. Here are ten more that I would call advanced beginner, because only some characters are ready to cut, there is detail such that you will need to cut in larger sizes or or you will want to use your software’s break apart function to separate layers for different colors on these:
DB Hello Cupcake (same images as Sweet Treats Cricut Cartridge)
Ten great Doodlebats for die cutting
Every time the wonderful Dollar Days at Lettering Delights rolls around I see lots of questions popping up about which fonts are good for diecutting. So I put together a list of 10 popular Doodlebats that work great with SCAL or MTC and a Cricut. These are images that can be cut as is, without cleanup or separating the pieces, so they are great for beginners. What they have in common is that they are more of less silhouettes with clean lines and not too much detail. Have a look at these and you’ll be better able to evaluate other Doodlebats and/or artwork from other sources.
- DB Jack-0-Patterns and DB Jack-o-Patterns 2
- DB Boo Ya
- DB Good Company
- DB Fruity Expressions
- DB Little What Nots
- DB Nativity
- DB Geo Deco Solid
- DB Animal Occasion
tip: to get rid of the phrases choose the lower case version
Some shirts I made with freezer paper/paint (L) and heat transfer flocking (R) and DB Animal Occasion
- DB Floragraphy
- DB Cameo Busts
You may also want to look at the Lettering Delights Clip Art sets as many of them have line art (black and white) versions that are just as easy to trace and use as coloring book images.
Update: Jin over at Under a Cherry tree just posted a great guide to picking Lettering Delights products. You will want to spend some time at the blog looking at her projects. She really know how to make these Lettering Delights files sing.
Doodlebats plus gel pens equals print and cut
Here’s a a new video on using Doodlebats from Lettering Delights with your Cricut and gel pens to digistamp. Sound is messed up so you’ll have to turn it all the way up.
Samples from video colored in with Bic markers
Fonts shown in the video:
Some other good Doodlebats for gel pen digistamping:
Character map templates for Inkscape and Illustrator
Back in the day, there was a great free program for the Mac called TypeBook, which I used to print specimen sheets and character maps for my fonts. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the leap to OS X. I have been using an Excel spreadsheet to print character maps for my giant collection of dingbat fonts in the intervening years, but wanted to make something easier to use and to share. The result is my Inkscape version that you can download here.
And I also made a version for Adobe Illustrator that you can download here. Illustrator has a built in character table (Type menu>Glyphs), but if you want something to print out, this will come in handy.
Here’s what a completed page looks like for my 09kutups font.
Make a dingbat font with Inkscape
Buried in Inkscape .47 is the ability to make your own SVG fonts. This isn’t all that exciting because even Inkscape can’t use SVG fonts. However, pair this with a free font conversion tool and you now have a way to create your own TrueType fonts for free! The font creation features are not well developed yet, and there is precious little documentation, but after playing with this quite a while I have finally come up with a set of procedures that works. View/download the tutorial (PDF) here. View the video here. If you develop an original font for digital diecutters, please let me know so I can post it on my fonts page.
Related links
- fontstarter.svg file Inkscape file to be used with the tutorial
- Dingbat map webapp (Windows) for viewing your completed font
- Online Font Converter or Free Font Converter
- Inkscape documentation covering font editor
- See and download some example fonts at Denise’s Scrapbooking Room
