One of my favorite things to do when poking around on the internet is finding great fonts to download. Most designers thrive on nifty fonts. However, most people are only familiar with the fonts that are loaded onto your computer. They are all fairly standard. Your Times New Roman, Comic Sans MS, Verdana, Arial and its many variations. Everyone sees these guys; they’ve been gracing popular  websites since the 90’s (Just for fun: Check out the Times New Roman font on Yahoo! homepage from July 5, 1998 — thank you Wayback Machine.) Folks may not know the name offhand, but they recognize good ol’ TNR. However, when you are trying to be creative, you are constantly looking for new ways to create the title of a newsletter, a logo for your business, or a watermark for your photos, and you don’t want to use any of the aforementioned fonts. They are decades old, and classics never die; but if you watched Forrest Gump every single day, it would get boring. Nobody wants their business to sport Times New Roman 12 point double spaced font. Save that for the term papers and 90’s websites.

One font people commonly overlook as being useful is something like Wingdings. This is called a Dingbat font. These are fonts that aren’t usually “letters” but little pictures. Most people remember that the capital J in Wingdings makes a smiley face. (How useful!)

What people often don’t know is that there are other Dingbat fonts out there… of almost anything imaginable. Some are useful while some or not. I can’t say that I would ever need to use Restroom Signs TFB for any practical purpose. But who knows; someone might need a dingbat of a stick figure sitting on the commode. (Just in case you’re wondering, it is a lowercase “b”.)

So, while meandering around on Dafont.com, I started looking at Kimberly Geswein (KG) fonts. Let me just go on the record and say that I love them. Most of her fonts are cute and handwriting type fonts, which are great for website and graphic design, especially girly stuff. But better yet are her “Flavor and Frames” series.There are about a million and one hits for “Free Fonts” if you Google it. One of my favorite font websites is www.dafont.com. I’m not exactly sure why, it’s just clean and user friendly.

This is what I’m talking about (and these graphics aren’t even all inclusive!):

Flavor and Frames 1

Flavor and Frames 2

Flavor and Frames 3

Flavor and Frames 4

When I came across these adorable little dingbats, I got super excited. For a blogger or scrapbooker, or even photographer, these could be used to make logos, greetings, cards, watermarks, invitations, newsletters, etc. The sky is the limit.

Here are just a few fun things I’ve done using Photoshop and KG Flavor and Frames series:

And of course, the header for this blog!

Don’t have photoshop? You can use Microsoft Word to create these things as well for creating graphics for websites, labels, scrapbooking and printing! (If you’d like, I can discuss the “How To’s” of layering and graphic design in Microsoft Word in a later post.)

And there are about a million other things you can do with them… so get to downloading and creating! If you’ve made anything with them, please share. The sky is the limit.