Fun With Fonts
Creating web graphics with decorative and dingbat fonts is one of my favorite pastimes. I get a lot of my fonts from dafont.com and I use them for hours and hours of creative fun.
Here’s how to create flower images like the examples above. Using PhotoImpact, (or your favorite graphics program) create a new image. (I used a transparent background initially because I wanted to save my image as a stamp or object to be implemented in other projects later.)
Next, (if you’ve installed it), select one of the dingbat fonts called Kalocsa Flowers. (I selected the letter “k” for Example 1 and “f” for Example 2)
Next, use the resize tool to increase the size of the font object. Use the select tool and change the selection to an image object. Using the paint tools you can pretty much choose any brush stroke, color or other effects as needed. On both flower objects, I used a two-color gradient. I then changed my image from 2D to 3D giving it a very small 2 to 5px beveled border. The final step was to give it a shadow. And the end result is what you see in the examples.
You can create all sorts of graphics with fonts using any image editor you like. Try similar things in PaintShop Pro, the Gimp, PhotoShop, etc. Though each editor has it’s own text tools, each one has the ability to work with image objects or path objects and using trial and error, like I did, you can come up with neat stuff for your web projects. Have fun with fonts!
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