UB Big Caps Books

Before icon libraries and readily available clip art, there were dingbats. Dingbats - formerly known as printer's ornaments - are pictograms, symbols, or what we in modern times might call glyphs. The use of dingbats has a long history, dating back to the 19th century when printers began experimenting with decorative elements to enhance the appearance of printed materials - adding to the heavy ornamental style of the time. Once we entered the digital age, dingbats had to be digitized, and type designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf was up for the task. While working for the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1977, Zapf created over 1000 glyphs - 360 of which were selected by ITC to become ITC Zapf Dingbats, which would later become known as the original and most widely known dingbat collection of all time. In the early days of digital typography, Zapf's Dingbats quickly became a staple in computer graphics, and other designers began designing their own Dingbat collections. In a digital space, dingbats are complete typefaces accessed by pressing specific key sequences, and by the early 90s, there were multiple typefaces full of these special characters. In 1995, UB's Director of Technology (then adjunct professor), Dave Patschke created UB Big Caps Book, a resource for students at the University of Baltimore. This book would serve as a guide for students to quickly find special characters and their key sequences from the fonts available in the Graphics Lab on campus.