Aesthetic Symbols — Copy and Paste

Almost none of these symbols were made to look pretty. The flowers and sparkles (✿ ❀ ✧ ✦) are Dingbats, a set Unicode took from the ITC Zapf Dingbats typeface in its earliest versions. ⋆ and ⊹ are math operators — ⊹ is the sign for a Hermitian conjugate matrix. ˚ and ˖ are spacing marks from phonetics, and ₊ ⁺ are the subscript and superscript plus signs.

Others are letters and digits from living scripts. The bow ୨୧ is the Odia digits two and one, from the script of Odisha in eastern India, set side by side. The soft brackets ꒰ ꒱ and the wave pieces ꒷ ꒦ are radicals from the Yi script of Sichuan in southwest China. ʚ ɞ are phonetic letters, and ꕤ is a syllable of the Vai script from Liberia. People picked them for their shapes, and the shapes stuck.

Support depends on age and script. The Dingbats and phonetic marks have been in Unicode since the early 1990s and show on any phone. The Egyptian hieroglyphs 𓆉 (a freshwater turtle) and 𓇼 (a star) were added in 2009, and the sleep moon ⏾ in 2016, so an older device may show a box instead. Letters from other scripts, like ꒰ ꒱ or ୨୧, need a font for that script, which most current phones and computers have.

Mixing matters too. On this site we found that halfwidth Japanese marks such as ｡ and ﾟ, placed right next to fancy styled letters, can make a browser pick one Japanese font for the whole line — and that font has no styled letters, so they turn into boxes. Keep those marks away from styled text. The Dingbats and phonetic marks here are safe neighbours.

Pick one or two symbol families and repeat them: ✧ for sparkle, ✿ for flowers, ☾ for night, ♪ ♫ for music. Frame a word (✧ dreamer ✧), start each bio line with the same mark, or put a divider like ︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶ between sections.

Keep it short where your words matter. Screen readers may read each symbol's name aloud, so a row of ten symbols can become ten spoken words before your actual bio. One symbol on each side of a name reads as a frame; a full line reads as a divider.