Well, that I know, there is a tone of Pies: Astrology pi, audio pi, deco pi, game pi, holiday pi, and on and on and on...

I recommend you to search on type foundries websites, most of them have a category just for dingbats. I guess you will have to go on a hunt :) - Try the freefonts sites, just google “freefonts”.

Regards

-Andre

I’m looking for a descriptor of these kinds of fonts.

I’m NOT looking for dingbats, or free fonts, just what these fonts are called.

symbol fonts

http://www.myfonts.com/browse/category/myfonts/symbol/

or

http://www.myfonts.com/browse/category/myfonts/picture/

These are NOT Pi fonts, or picture fonts or symbol fonts. Generally, glyphs in Pi fonts do not look like letters. The look like pictures or symbols.

Am I so very hard to understand?

Is there a name for these types of fonts?

“Novelty” is the usual term in older type catalogs.

Those are book fonts made for setting longer texts/extended reading.

dafonts?

Not picture fonts (as those are presumed non-alphabetic), but you can call them picture typefaces.

The tools typeface is slightly different, as the illustrations aren’t embellishments, but are actually the letters forms—a rebus effect, but at the level of letter, rather than word.

I think Gill said it best - these are “pictures of things”

I’m not aware of an existing term for fonts like these. How about calling them representational fonts?

Fantasia (?) ...

On my computer, I store these in the folder named “Pi Letters”. An ad hoc solution by a non-native speaker :-)

Decorated fonts? In my private classification system, these would go into the ‘Wood & Co’ folder – where they’ll meet the eponymous Logger, Drift Wood and Campfire – and likely won’t see the light of day again. : )

I’ve been calling these “picture element fonts” because I didn’t know what they were called. When someone asked me about them, I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know what the “correct” name was, assuming there was a label for these kinds of fonts.

I Googled “novelty fonts” and came up with this site http://ingrimayne.com/fonts2/_noveltya.html that referred to “fonts in which the letters are made from things, from paper clips to bugs to tools” as letterbat fonts, which I had heard of a long time ago but didn’t remember.

I agree with Nick that there is a distinction between letters that are made of things, like tools, and fonts that are embellished with vines, hearts, stars, etc. I’m not sure I like rebus fonts; that reminds me of the game (show) “Win, Lose, or Draw,” or Pictionary.

So far, I like Novelty, Picture fonts, and Pi letters, letterbats, embellished fonts, decorated fonts. I even found dinglets and dingfonts in a Google search!

This probably doesn’t interest the pros who set type or do layouts for magazines, advertisements, newspapers, brochures, etc. But every once in a while it’s nice to use fun fonts. Even though Judith Sutcliffe’s Hibiscus is not very much liked by professional types, I once saw it used in a travel advertisement. And I’m sure more than one restaurant has used a font embellished with chili peppers. And yes, some of these fonts shouldn’t ever see the light of day again (e.g., fonts made out of spermatozoon, poop, etc). Whether we like or hate all or some or none of them, why shouldn’t there be a taxonomy of even these fonts?

Maybe we should have a contest!

• Fonts with each letter made of a different element (different tools, musical istruments, animals)
• Fonts with each letter made of a common element (nails, logs, barbed wire, typewriter keys, paper clips, bamboo, people in different poses)
• Fonts with letters embelished with picture elements (hearts, flowers, stars, eyeballs, bees, bugs, vines)
• Fonts with letters inside a picture element (animals, soldiers, trains, blocks, baloons, pumpkins, footprints, leaves)

Even if this doesn’t go any further, I thank those of you who uderstood my question — and contributed ideas, comments, suggestions, and answers.

> presumably short for pictogram or picture

Good guess, but my understanding is that a pi font is named after ... pi (the greek letter). To the early printers, anything not in the Latin alphabet was pi.

A lot of these fonts are like an onomatopoeia — a word that imitates the sound it describes. Or, how about calling them “theme” fonts?

If you’re going to make a typeface just so it looks like some real-life artifact, why not just go all out like our good friend Stefan Sagmeister (a little shocking perhaps, i think the letters were done with intestines, thus the link, and not the actual image)?:

http://www.sagmeister.com/worknew8.html

“Maybe we should have a contest!”
...and what is the prize going to be for my Spam-carved connecting script face with Beowolf-ish pine nut inserts on a bed of spikey greens with rasberry vinegrette?

Cheers!

...and what is the prize going to be...?

http://daughternumberthree.blogspot.com/2008/03/full-metal-dog.html

...and what is the prize going to be...?

How about 4 issues of U&lc, one for the best answer in each of the 4 categories?

The overall heading I’ll concede as novelty fonts.
Under that heading, I’m looking for the best descriptor of:
* Fonts with each letter made of a different element (different tools, musical instruments, animals)
* Fonts with each letter made of a common element (nails, logs, barbed wire, typewriter keys, paper clips, bamboo, people in different poses)
* Fonts with letters embellished with picture elements (hearts, flowers, stars, eyeballs, bees, bugs, vines)
* Fonts with letters inside a picture element (animals, soldiers, trains, blocks, balloons, pumpkins, footprints, leaves)

You can let me pick the best answer, or you can vote on it.

In case of duplicate answers, or answers already suggested, the one with the most best answers or the first best answer wins. Obviously, thare may be overlaps, or my four categories may not be worthy of differentiation.

* Fonts with each letter made of a different element (different tools, musical instruments, animals)

theme fonts

* Fonts with each letter made of a common element (nails, logs, barbed wire, typewriter keys, paper clips, bamboo, people in different poses)

gimmick fonts

* Fonts with letters embellished with picture elements (hearts, flowers, stars, eyeballs, bees, bugs, vines)

decorated fonts

* Fonts with letters inside a picture element (animals, soldiers, trains, blocks, balloons, pumpkins, footprints, leaves)

picto-fonts

I think all font designers are familiar with suggestions from non-designers such as: why don’t you make a font with letters made of puppies, hot dogs, naked people etc. Of all the terms I’ve heard, “theme fonts” seems to the most obvious and many font sites categorize them that way. I don’t see how splitting into abstract sub-genres would increase clarity. Functionally, Ch’s categories all function the same way. In a railway theme font: railway cars with letters on them, letters made of tracks, or letters that look like railway cars all perform the same basic function. Choosing one over another is just a matter of taste

Concrete subgenres are self-evident. Flower theme fonts, footprint theme fonts, feces theme fonts etc.

The more I think about it, the more I like the term “theme”. “Novelty” is traditional, but makes about as much sense as “miscellaneous” or “other” or “bizarre” or “unusual”. It just says the fonts look... different. “Theme” goes more to the intention of the designer.

I’ve also seen decorated fonts (basically normal letters with other stuff added) called “florid” or “floriated”, although that seems to imply only flower-like additions.

um... i don’t really care either, just playin’ the game.

do i win if nobody else plays ? smiling emoticon.

A quote from this thread has been ripped from it’s context and Twitter’d here: http://www.twitter.com/typophile

Carry on.