Why the Wingdings Font Exists (2015)

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/25/9200801/wingdings-font-history

by davidhariri • 5 years ago

86 27 5 years ago

vox.com

jnwatson• 5 years ago

As the article mentions, the Macintosh had a similar font years before.

I recall a very early Macintosh game even used a custom font for its sprites.

hinkley• 5 years ago

We rediscovered icon fonts about 15 years ago for web applications and I recall conversations that mentioned Wingdings.

It's like finding something in the back of a drawer that you completely forgot you had and now can't recall why it got lost in the first place.

greggturkington• 5 years ago

Yep, we rediscovered them, then we rediscovered they were bad (on the web)

https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/

duskwuff• 5 years ago

Early Macintosh systems had several such fonts, including Cairo and Mobile. The icons in those fonts were a lot weirder than Wingdings or Dingbats -- where else can you find a font which includes glyphs for a fried egg, an ankh, a frog, and a dogcow?

danaliv• 5 years ago

And who could forget Cairo ShootOut? https://macintoshgarden.org/games/cairo-shootout

(God rest your soul, Mr. Blehm.)

michaelt• 5 years ago

PCB CAD software Altium doesn't have a way to import vector images for PCBs - but it DOES have the ability to put vector TrueType font text on them.

So if you need to put a UL/CE/FCC/ROHS logo on your board? Altium recommend you use the special 'mooretronics' font [1] where common symbols have been lovingly converted into the glyphs of a TrueType font.

[1] https://techdocs.altium.com/sites/default/files/resize/wiki_...

knolax• 5 years ago

Seems like a massive oversight given most PCB files are just a bunch of glorified vector images.

dhosek3• 5 years ago

I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal around 2000±a year or so about Wingdings when there was a moral panic about what happened if you typed NYC in the wingdings font (I was editing a typography magazine at the time which is how the reporter found me). I patiently explained that the arrangement of characters in dingbat fonts is generally arbitrary with patterns generally dictated by character code more than anything else and that as someone who knew Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes, I could vouch that they were not, in fact, anti-semites.

dhosek3• 5 years ago

(There was an article I read, I think in the Chicago Tribune, around that time which indicated that by having my name appear in the newspaper I had slightly increased my probability of being kidnapped. My probability, according to their formula, was still less than 1% and true to form, I have yet to be kidnapped.)

bombcar• 5 years ago

This sounds like a inverse of "kidnapped people are usually famous and famous people have their name in the paper."

jansan2• 5 years ago

I disagree with the arbitrary arrangement of characters.

If you write NYC in Webdings, you have an eye, a heart and a skyline, which I read as "I love New York". Could be a coincidence, but very unlikely IMO.

senkora• 5 years ago

That is intentional and was a direct reaction to the original controversy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings

Following the controversy over possible anti-Semitic messages in the Wingdings font, Connare intentionally rendered the Webdings character sequence "NYC" as an eye, a heart, and a city skyline, referring to the I Love New York logo.

rgaino• 5 years ago

In 1996 at my first job as a programmer, the company had a system where the password field in the login screen was obscured by using wingdings as the font. :)

netsharc• 5 years ago

But... that's not clever. Someone with a good memory can just remember the symbols and test out each letter on the keyboard using the font.

"Person, woman, man camera, TV"...

recursive• 5 years ago

Yes, I do believe that's the reason the story was related.

tricky• 5 years ago

nice! I worked at a place in 1999 that had an RTF file on a public share that had the passwords for everything. It was ok because it was encrypted with wingdings...

b3lvedere• 5 years ago

I have only used it as a font in the 3D Text screensaver. Set the screensaver to display the time, max speed and use one of the Wingdings fonts. It confused the hell out of people. :)

gmueckl2• 5 years ago

You can still do that in Windows 10. I just tried it and discovered that the screen saver settings dialog looks like it hasn't been touched in about 20 years. It still shows the screensaver preview in a CRT monitor frame...

datameta2• 5 years ago

I wonder that's related to the fact that screen burn in stopped being an issue with the wide adoption of LCDs. People still certainly continued using them as habit, for enjoyment, or due to default settings - but its true purpose went out with the CRTs.

gayprogrammer• 5 years ago

I was thinking about why Wingdings, a popular phenomenon in Word docs, didn’t translate into the web, chat, and mobile SMS until the iPhone let us add the Japanese emoji keyboard.

The technical difference that I can see is that Wingdings is mapped to English letters (I.E. the same code points), whereas emoji are mapped to their own code points. So while Wingdings are typed using the standard keyboard, emoji (still today) requires a dedicated program/menu/keyboard to select them.

Additionally, font is often ignored/lost in transmission, in things like email, web text boxes, SMS. So what made emoji just work is that it used unique code points, not reusing other characters’ code points.

uranusjr• 5 years ago

I suspect your “additionally” part is in fact the main reason. Emojis in Japanese phones were transmitted not by font information, but dedicated code points like Unicode. East Asian SMS systems need to implement multi-byte encoding for “real characters” anyway so it’s considerably less friction to add some fun ones. That’s much more difficult argument to make if you’re designing a system for the American audience.

zinekeller• 5 years ago

East Asian SMS systems need to implement multi-byte encoding for “real characters” anyway so it’s considerably less friction to add some fun ones. That’s much more difficult argument to make if you’re designing a system for the American audience.

It definitely helped, but the reality is that the carriers also have (had?) complementary e-mail services provided for free or low-cost, which was uncommon in the rest of the world (especially in the '90s and early 2000s!). For example, au (part of KDDI) had implemented their emoji (before standardisation) using image tags.

SeanLuke• 5 years ago

Hmph. I always thought of Wingdings as an unimaginative version of Susan Kare's Cairo, sans dogcow.

Why the Wingdings Font Exists (2015)

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