Why the Wingdings font exists

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0:00Celtic cross, finger pointing, Star of David does the Wingdings font exist? How many people

0:05are sending crucial interoffice memos that chronicle the saga of a mailbox? It turns

0:12out that Wingdings has a purpose — and a history — that ties back to the very beginning

0:16of printing. Printing wasn’t always typing. It involved manually setting every letter,

0:23and every word, and every line on every page. Just printing text was a tedious process.

0:29Pretty text was a whole different matter. So printers invented a shortcut. Enter the

0:34dingbat. Dingbats were ornamental pieces that could

0:38transform any page from plain to ornate. Instead of making an new piece of type, slotting

0:43in a dingbat decorated text efficiently.

0:48We don’t know where the name came from - it might be from the Dutch word for “thing”,

0:52or maybe it’s just what a piece of type sounds like when it hits the floor. But we

0:56do know the purpose — saving time, beautifully. And those same limitations brought dingbats

1:02to the modern era. You might recognize typographer Hermann Zapf

1:06from Zapfino, the gorgeous calligraphic typeface that’s showed up on a lot of computers.

1:12He was a bridge between the old and new — he embraced computers, but was such a talented

1:17calligrapher that Hallmark made an entire movie about him in

1:211967 just to watch him write. That sense of history and embrace of change

1:26led him to make Zapf Dingbats, a classic dingbat font designed in the late 70s. Just as printers

1:32wanted to save time using dingbats, a generation of computer typographers saved time with dingbat fonts.

1:38His proteges, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes,

1:42were inspired by him when they created their own digital dingbat font, Lucida Icons, Stars,

1:47and Arrows. Microsoft bought the rights and called them

1:51Wingdings, combining Windows, Dingbats, and the party-like feel of a “wingding.”

1:55But people missed the point from the beginning.

1:58In 1992, the New York Post freaked out because typing NYC in Wingdings

2:04spelled what looked like an anti-semitic message (they changed it to I Heart NY in Webdings).

2:11Conspiracy theorists had a new toy. But Wingdings was never intended to be typed.

2:17Just like Dingbats, it was meant to save time, in an age when pictures were

2:21hard to make. Wingdings was, in a way, before its time.

2:25It was the offline predecessor of the emoji — a way to send messages quickly, using

2:30pictures. And in that way, it endures.

2:34And that is capital C C C.

2:37I wanted to know what Charles Bigelow's favorite Wingdings were. So I asked him. And he said he was

2:44partial to these fleurons. They're the flowery dingbats that you see here.

2:47And he said that these were inspired, at least in part, by some real flowers that were growing in his

2:53and Kris Holmes's garden the summer they designed what would become Wingdings.

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