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Why the Wingdings font exists - Video học tiếng Anh
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Why the Wingdings font exists
Why the Wingdings font exists
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Phụ đề (36)
0:00
Celtic cross, finger pointing, Star of David does the Wingdings font exist? How many people
0:05
are sending crucial interoffice memos that chronicle the saga of a mailbox? It turns
0:12
out that Wingdings has a purpose — and a history — that ties back to the very beginning
0:16
of printing. Printing wasn’t always typing. It involved manually setting every letter,
0:23
and every word, and every line on every page. Just printing text was a tedious process.
0:29
Pretty text was a whole different matter. So printers invented a shortcut. Enter the
0:34
dingbat. Dingbats were ornamental pieces that could
0:38
transform any page from plain to ornate. Instead of making an new piece of type, slotting
0:43
in a dingbat decorated text efficiently.
0:48
We don’t know where the name came from - it might be from the Dutch word for “thing”,
0:52
or maybe it’s just what a piece of type sounds like when it hits the floor. But we
0:56
do know the purpose — saving time, beautifully. And those same limitations brought dingbats
1:02
to the modern era. You might recognize typographer Hermann Zapf
1:06
from Zapfino, the gorgeous calligraphic typeface that’s showed up on a lot of computers.
1:12
He was a bridge between the old and new — he embraced computers, but was such a talented
1:17
calligrapher that Hallmark made an entire movie about him in
1:21
1967 just to watch him write. That sense of history and embrace of change
1:26
led him to make Zapf Dingbats, a classic dingbat font designed in the late 70s. Just as printers
1:32
wanted to save time using dingbats, a generation of computer typographers saved time with dingbat fonts.
1:38
His proteges, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes,
1:42
were inspired by him when they created their own digital dingbat font, Lucida Icons, Stars,
1:47
and Arrows. Microsoft bought the rights and called them
1:51
Wingdings, combining Windows, Dingbats, and the party-like feel of a “wingding.”
1:55
But people missed the point from the beginning.
1:58
In 1992, the New York Post freaked out because typing NYC in Wingdings
2:04
spelled what looked like an anti-semitic message (they changed it to I Heart NY in Webdings).
2:11
Conspiracy theorists had a new toy. But Wingdings was never intended to be typed.
2:17
Just like Dingbats, it was meant to save time, in an age when pictures were
2:21
hard to make. Wingdings was, in a way, before its time.
2:25
It was the offline predecessor of the emoji — a way to send messages quickly, using
2:30
pictures. And in that way, it endures.
2:34
And that is capital C C C.
2:37
I wanted to know what Charles Bigelow's favorite Wingdings were. So I asked him. And he said he was
2:44
partial to these fleurons. They're the flowery dingbats that you see here.
2:47
And he said that these were inspired, at least in part, by some real flowers that were growing in his
2:53
and Kris Holmes's garden the summer they designed what would become Wingdings.
