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