It seems, though, that the secret for many of us lies in gathering a wealth of shapes, concepts and outlines as reference and inspiration. Dingbats can be a useful tool for prompting creativity and reducing creation time. Dingbat shapes offer a partially formed canvas for designers to experiment with layout and graphic concepts. They are perfect for navigation bar outlines or components, section identifying visual marks, page dividers and texture backgrounds. Some designers use dingbats often in logo design.
Dingbats are low priced, easy to access and versatile.
Any graphic designer already has the software to create graphics from a dingbat font. Paint programs like PhotoShop, Corel PhotoPaint or PaintShop Pro and vector programs like CorelDraw, Illustrator and Freehand. Any program that will take a symbol and convert it to curves or render it from text will work. In all programs your starting point is to select the dingbat font and type the chosen character. In vector programs, you must convert the font to curves.