Dingbats: arrows, shapes, flowers, stars, checkmarks, pictograms

Dingbats have been circling our attention for a while, yet we never made it the centrepiece of a typeface. From the moment we began developing our constructivist typeface Boxi, we felt the need for a counterpoint, something that would soften its sharp edge without undermining the visuality. Dingbats became the natural answer. It was clear to us that strong dingbats belonged in a bold, primarily graphic font. In putting this piece together, we went through a genuine process of research, and we are sharing that journey here alongside the visual references that shaped the final result.

"Dingbat" was always a strange word. Originally a playful catch-all term, that always carried a sense of whimsy. :P In typography, it broadly refers to ornamental or symbolic glyphs — arrows, shapes, flowers, stars, checkmarks, pictograms — elements used to decorate, guide, or emphasize text rather than to convey letters or numbers. Nonverbal, but not meaningless. Dingbats echo humanity's long tradition of communicating through images as old as the urge to draw on walls.

They were reusable – sets of symbols and special characters used to frame or embellish printed pages. Instead of arranging every ornament, printers could drop plain text into a combination of dingbats without doing everything by hand. Practical, but also quietly expressive.

Over time, this decorative layer of typography has rather evolved into the digital as a compensatory tool for gaps in digital communication. Since then, emojis have slipped into our visual language, as “new hieroglyphics.” Hermann Zapf gets some of the credit — or blame, depending on how you feel about his fonts. His Zapf Dingbats (1975–78) was the first widely available symbol-based font on laser printers, a set of glyphs that would eventually feed into the Unicode system. Then came Wingdings (1990–92), Webdings (1997), each adding to a growing visual vocabulary that most people used without thinking much about. Wingdings and Wingdings 2 went broad — pictograms for everything. Wingdings 3 narrowed it down to arrows, almost aggressively.

By the early 2000s, Wingdings had taken on a second life. In forums and chatrooms, people were using it like a cipher. Someone would drop a string of random combinations in Wingdings as a miniature puzzle for friends to decode (since then there is a game based on that). It started to circulate as jokes on the internet. So even before memes had a name, Wingdings acted like one.

In 1992, days after the release of Windows 3.1, someone noticed that typing "NYC" in Wingdings produced a skull and crossbones, a Star of David, and a thumbs-up. These controversies were never really about the font, that was visually cryptic, but more about the tool that it gave to the community of the early web and that still dominates the way we use the internet nowadays: spinning stories from coincidence and remixing it, fueled by the thrill of decoding.

Ornaments derived and digitized from historic fonts like Caslon, Bodoni, or Garamond are now rarely used. Even the original function of emojis has faded: younger generations often use them ironically rather than literally, Some have gone further back still, to the ASCII combinations Kevin MacKenzie was experimenting with in 1979. :-) :)

Which brings us to our dingbats. Rather than making more literal icons — more tiny pictures of things — we made glyphs that sit somewhere else. Aesthetically rooted in the era when digital symbols were first being invented, but drawing from the part of that moment that never made it into pixels: the nocturnal side, the hallucinatory side, closer to an image you'd half-remember from a fever than anything you'd tap on a screen

Part of the impulse came from the cultural climate we’re in. Standardized icons have flattened visual expression; emojis have drifted from literal meaning into irony, sarcasm, deadpan humor. The alternative is a language of symbols that doesn't strive to be universally legible, behaving instead like impressions, moods, or projections of a psychic state.

A fitting reference for this alternative lies far before the digital age, past even the structured system of hieroglyphics. It can be also found in geoglyphs: massive, mysterious drawings etched into the earth by moving rocks and landscape elements, ancient forms of land art whose purpose remains enigmatic. Recently, AI and drone analysis in the Nazca desert revealed previously unknown shapes. Like something out of Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, these lands contain written images of creatures that may never have existed, rendered at a scale only visible from above. They are organic, flowing forms, projections of the imagination blurring the line between dream and nightmare.

The glyph set for the upcoming Boxi typeface draws directly from these projections. Stepping away from purely figurative or exclusively practical signs, its imagery evokes a parallel sphere of expression through concrete, yet abstract, images. Where modern emojis rely on literal icons for immediate communication, here even everyday gestures are reinterpreted. Conventional, universally recognized signs, such as an “OK” hand or a pointing finger, give way to hands making "air quotes," a gesture that suspends and questions meaning rather than merely directing it.

This approach finds its direct lineage in the eclectic, psychedelic visual spectrum of the most physical and visual artifact maker: LSD. Since around 1970, after LSD became illegal, it began to appear on sheets of a perforated, so called blotter paper, in a repetitive grid featuring images, that can identify the dosage or the maker of the substance. It can be a single massive image fragmented by the perforations, while other times they can act as a structural container for a multitude of different motifs and abstract figures, and it behaves exactly like a typographic dingbat set.

The images reproduced were various, blending every variety of pop art, from Mickey mouse and animated characters to esoteric elements like occult or religious symbols, moiré patterns, and fractal designs. The use of esoteric or occult symbols within this context can be understood not as arbitrary, but as a consequence of the psychedelic experience itself, which produces deeply symbolic imagery and recurring motifs – such as eyes, spirals, and concentric forms – that already carry established meanings within esoteric and religious visual systems.

In this sense, these hallucinating mechanism, that can be observed in Latin American indigenous culture – as the one we have mentioned – under the same psychoactive plants, such as ayahuasca, generate structured, repeatable, and highly stylized forms that can be codified into a visual language.

In this way, the blotter becomes not only a carrier of the substance but also a visual field where popular culture and symbolic imagery coexist within the same perceptual logic. 

But in the 90s some sort of mascots or minimal acid figures, that where born under the influence of the music and the acid experience, started inhabitathing those cartoons. Plastikman’s 1993 Sheet One stands as an example of many. This acid techno album artwork, beyond presenting an acid figure that well synthesises its aesthetic of that decade, it replicated the exact look and texture of a perforated blotter sheet.

Analyzing this era, it was a decade where typography often morphed into dingbats, flowers, and most recurrently, spirals.This tendency echoes through Deee-Lite’s artwork, where these shapes are used obsessively alongside illustrations, acting almost as a projection of a hallucinatory cartoon intro. Similarly, the calligraphy in Madonna’s albums and publications feels like a possessed script erupting directly from the unconscious or the pure motion of desire, incorporating spirals everywhere, even within question marks.

That pure organic form was often balanced with the digital precision of those years’ technology and is perfectly captured in Paul Nicholson’s 1991 Aphex Twin logo: an amorphous, alien shape functioning exactly like a dingbat. But what clarifies what we wanted to do with the Boxi typeface is captured particularly in Life in the Streets by Prince Ital Joe: the typography here, beyond the title (where that absorption actually happens), rather than absorbing organic shapes directly into the font, stands in clear contrast to it. Thus, in our case, the dingbats are organic, almost melting, caught between recognizability and distortion, cutting sharply against the geometry of the tape-shaped letterforms.

Those straight lines do not aim to be somehow correct in the sense of form, but are more likely inspired by some irregularities of people’s creativity. Boxi comes out of the same proportions as Animo, which brings the tradition of the typography of Spanish business signs, but as if it were replicated with tape. Those irregularities that come out of it are what make it so imperfect, yet so interesting for us. It was originally conceived as a stylistic set for Animo, but during its development and confrontation, we realised that it was already clearly distinguishable from its original form, and adding those dingbats to it confirmed it.

The result is, in fact, a visual playground inhabited by eclectic spirits. A cast of characters fuses playful, animalistic shapes that are already used but still revisited, with some organic – almost germ-like, dangerous-looking – glyphs, along with ancient, esoteric motifs: such as the ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail to symbolize the eternal cycle of destruction and rebirth, and the Kokopelli, the traditional humpbacked flute player and fertility deity. Everything is bound by the same childish yet acid aesthetic: whether an amphibian-looking flower or a mythological symbol, they all stare back with cute but undeniably unsettling eyes, unified by a recurring abundance of spirals, much like those found in the tails of animals.

Ultimately, these figures become a projection of the mind, a sensation rooted in those trippy years. They are not trying to be useful. They are not trying to be strictly legible. They simply hold a cryptic meaning, which is, in the end, what dingbats have always done.