Hashbats are inspired by the designs of characters referred to as Dingbats, the ornamental glyphs used by the printing profession, which were developed to fill space on the page and provide embellishment to printed texts, and are as old as the printing press itself. Similar characters were used in the development of the computer fonts that we may know as Wingdings or Webdings today.

Thousands of Dingbats exist, either in physical form to use in letterpress printing, or in the form of computer fonts.

While many of the 32 Hashbats used in this project are similar to Dingbats, Wingdings or Webdings already in existence, no font libraries or SVG files are used to create them. All Hashbats are drawn using p5js. An algorithm randomly selects a grid-size and color palette before randomly assigning Hashbats to locations on the canvas.

Some symbols were created using random shapes, lines and curves and any resemblance to symbols that have meaning in any non-English language are entirely unintentional.