What are Dingbats?
In typography, a "dingbat" is an ornament, spacer, or character used for typesetting that isn't a letter or a number. The term was popularized by the famous "Zapf Dingbats" font in the 1970s.
Legacy in Digital Age
Many of these symbols were originally designed for printing presses to add visual flair to documents (like the Floral Heart ❦ used to end a chapter). Today, they are part of the Unicode standard, meaning you can use them in texts, emails, and tweets just like emojis, but often with a more retro, monochrome aesthetic.
- Communication: Symbols like ✂ (cut here), ✈ (air mail/travel), and ☎ (phone number) are staples in business card design and forms.
- Pointers: Before we had colorful hand emojis, the black and white pointers (☞ ☛) were the standard way to direct attention to a link or a paragraph.
Religious and Cultural Symbols
The Dingbats block in Unicode also preserves many significant cultural icons, from the Peace Sign (☮) to the Yin Yang(☯), allowing for cross-cultural communication without language barriers.