Typebox / Servicebox

picture fonts

Picture fonts (Pi-fonts, symbol fonts) are typefaces without letters. Instead, every keystroke on your keyboard yields a different visual symbol - an icon, graphic, or illustration.

Use
Their advantages come in where you need many small illustrations on one subject, in one consistent style and quality, and reliably simple use. Unlike managing individual clip art files, a picture font offers immediate access to many images in the same easy way as a typeface. Use them as pictograms in publications or signage systems; to call for major attention in initials or vignettes opening or closing an article, or to fill occasional spaces.

Format
Typebox™ picture fonts are created under the same quality guidelines as our regular typefaces, and in the same formats: Postscript 1 and TrueType. These formats allow true ease-of-use on all platforms and applications, and the same manipulations that your software can perform on fonts. As both PS1 and TT supply monochromatic outlines, you can colorize and stylize these images as you can do with type.

Character set
Our picture fonts may come with a varying amount of characters (reflected in their pricing). This is due to the different subject or thematic range of each picture font, and the amount of images that each artist considers complete for his design. We provide information on these aspects.*

Ease of use for all
As keyboard layouts vary between languages, we use the basic character slots: [a-z, A-Z, and 0-9] for those symbols we expect to be most-likely and often used. Further symbol positions are chosen by ease of key combination. We avoid placing symbols into positions that are not shared between Macintosh and Windows platforms.

A document will be provided with each picture font, indicating which keys on the keyboard will produce which symbol.