The Principles of Beautiful Typography

Novelty Fonts

Novelty fonts, which are also known as display or decorative fonts, represent the vast majority of the fonts that are available for free online. Some of the fonts in this category, such as those in Figure 4.21, are modified versions of popular serif or sans-serif fonts, and some are completely off-the-wall ideas that would be better described as conceptual art than a font face. By their very nature, these fonts are less legible than their traditional counterparts, but when used sparingly, they can add a wealth of personality and flair to a design.

Novelty fonts often make good starting blocks for logo design and decorative type elements. If you take a look at the screenshot of the web site for Scandinavian design company Guilago in Figure 4.22, you'll notice two different novelty fonts. These fonts have been given some border and perspective treatments to form the company's logo.

As with all design choices, before you use a novelty font, you should think about your client's requirements and target audience. Most clients will already have some form of branding in place, and choosing a bizarre or offbeat novelty font may tarnish the company's image. Even so, it's best to keep an open mind when you're coming up with themes for a web site design. It may be that the company you're working with wants to stray away from its corporate image. Perhaps your clients want to create something a little more "personal." It seems this was the case for HP, given the font the company used in its "The Computer is Personal Again" ad campaign, shown in Figure 4.23.

The use of a creative, custom-designed novelty font in the HP campaign gives the commercials a very unique feel. The whimsical font, which I'd describe as being one part college notepaper scribble and one part Nightmare Before Christmas, definitely corroborates the personal theme of the campaign.

Dingbat Fonts

When you're looking for illustrations and artwork to incorporate into the design of a web site, one resource that shouldn't be ignored is dingbat or symbol fonts. In the early days of print, dingbats were ornamental characters that were used to separate printed text and fill whitespace. Original dingbat fonts consisted mainly of flourishes and commonly used symbols. However, the concept of dingbat fonts changed radically with the digital font revolution. Now, any series of graphics can be assigned as characters in a dingbat font.

While these fonts may not seem worthwhile from a typesetting perspective, they can be useful as supportive graphics and icons. Since fonts consist of scalable vector shapes, dingbat glyphs can be set to any size without becoming blurry. The only problem is that, to use these fonts, you have to know where to find the glyph you're after. Occasionally, I'll remember an arrow or symbol from a dingbat font and type out half the alphabet before I find the one I want. Fortunately, though, most dingbat fonts have a theme, so it's easy to remember which font the glyph is in, even if the specific character is hard to find.

When people think about dingbats, the first sets that come to mind are Wingdings and Webdings, the dingbat fonts that come pre-installed in Windows. There are actually hundreds of other dingbat fonts available on the Web. A few examples are given in Figure 4.24.