It’s probably not much of an exaggeration to say that nearly anyone who’s used a computer in the last 20 years has used some variation of Hermann Zapf’s Dingbats font.
The original Zapf Dingbats font was designed in the late 1970s, and gained fame in the ’80s during the desktop publishing revolution as one of the fonts included with Apple’s LaserWriter. Later, it was distributed with Adobe’s Acrobat Reader and the rest was history.
In the early ’90s, FontShop’s Jürgen Siebert and Johannes Erler conceived of and created a comprehensive update to Zapf Dingbats with more than 800 images, and thus was born FF Dingbats.
Of course, the past 20 years have seen a continued rapid evolution in design and technology, and FF Dingbats itself was in need of an update. Thus was born FF Dingbats 2.0, in which the dingbat set was further overhauled to feature more modern imagery, and a more consistent overall design. It also includes an Open Type layering feature that allows you to quickly combine multiple glyphs and apply colors to each component.
And now FontShop is offering a spin-off of the FF Dingbats 2.0 family for the low, low price of free. Erler Dingbats features over 200 glyphs including updated versions of standard dingbats, plus 17 new designs.
If the free font whets your appetite for even more dingbats, you can get the full package of FF Dingbats 2.0, including 12 fonts from FontShop for $389. You can also buy the individual dingbats fonts for $49 each.
This article was last modified on July 31, 2021
This article was first published on August 9, 2012
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