Dingbat Portrait Info

For our next project, we will tackle a challenging art task for any medium: Portraiture. The fun and funky part of our portrait is that it will be a way for us to explore a really cool aspect of type: DINGBATS!

Wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbat
A dingbat is an ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament" or "printer's character".

The term continued to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that had symbols and shapes in the positions designated for alphabetical or numeric characters.

Check out this website for some examples of dingbat portraits:
http://www.walyou.com/blog/2009/01/05/creative-singers-ad-bose-sound-system-designs/

Anyway, the first steps to achieving this portrait are to:
1. Learn a little bit about shading, value and abstraction. Follow the links below for some reading on this topic.
http://www.portrait-artist.org/basics/shading.html
http://www.portrait-artist.org/basics/shading-explained.html

2. Start finding some rad dingbats to fill your different value areas. Download the fonts, save the type files in your server folder, and install them in the Fonts folder in your Control Panel.
Search for dingbat fonts that represent your personality here:
http://www.dafont.com/
http://freeres.info/free-fonts.php