Cool Vectors from Old Fonts

old robot dingbat font

Before working on Kwippe I had no idea how many interesting graphics you could find in old dingbat fonts! Many of them were thrown online in the 90s, and tracking down the licenses and authors isn’t always easy. We’ve relied on Font Squirrel and DaFont for a few of these gems, and included references to their license page about them. It seems people created this stuff from books they scanned, personal drawings, and other miscellaneous sources that seem a bit nebulous. But some of these images are amazing - Davy’s Dingbats is one of my personal favorites. The art itself doesn’t always translate perfectly to SVG, I’ve found that once converted to layered SVGs, some of the files contain way too many path definitions to be useable. I had to get rid of some otherwise cool robots because they turned out a bit fuzzy around the edges, and others have such strange layering that our system can’t make good sense of them.

But for anybody interested in fonts - take a look at the dingbat fonts - there is way more variety than you’ve imagined!

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