When was wingdings made

In the early '90s, it was one of the first times people realized fonts could break through to the mainstream. As a means of writing sentences, Wingdings fails — but that was never its purpose. It was created to be used as a unique tool for the pre-internet era. It was akin to emojis, but with even more utility. Today it's easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be a lot harder.

There were few ways to get images, files were way too large for puny hard drives, and they were of poor quality. Even worse, it was tough to get pictures to play nicely with text. Fonts like Wingdings provided a workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that didn't clog up their hard drives. Two people made Wingdings happen: Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes proprietors of the firm and husband-and-wife team.

With Lucida, Bigelow and Holmes were at the vanguard of digital type designers. But to be complete, their font needed complementary characters that worked well with letters, so they designed them in Originally three separate fonts called Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows, and Lucida Stars, the fonts that became Wingdings were crafted to harmonize with text and made with similar proportions to Lucida.

Users could then pluck the appropriate icon, by typing the letter assigned to it, to ornament, animate, or otherwise adorn their documents without worrying about file size or poor quality. The breakthrough happened soon after: Microsoft bought the rights to Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows, and Lucida Stars in , and combined its favorites into a single font called "Wingdings" that was included in a beta test of Windows that year.

Storage size limited how many characters the company could include — it was only willing to include so many fonts in its floppy disc release. But despite the technological limitations, a cultural phenomenon was born.

Microsoft called it "Wingdings" to combine an old printing term, "dingbat," with "Windows" more on dingbats later. The new name had "the added connotation of suggesting wildness and excitement," Bigelow says, "like 'a real wingding. As today, Wingdings was occasionally misunderstood. While it was intended to be picked apart, used individually for a splash of imagery, users interpreted it as an unusual font for writing words.

That had unexpected consequences. Of course, Bigelow notes that the "hidden messages" were simply an accident of the font conversion process — Microsoft hadn't considered that users would read the grab bag of Wingdings images as a code for actual letters. Those conspiracy theories, as flawed as they were, ironically showed what a success Wingdings had become. From there, it was further adapted through additional icons and images, mutated forms like Webdings which Comic Sans designer Vincent Connare worked on , and other iterations.

The Lucida Icons spanned many eras. Charles Bigelow's favorite Wingdings are the floral elements, or fleurons, which were partly inspired by flowers in his and Holmes's garden the summer they designed the font.

Others are inspired by Renaissance printing, English roses, and other foliage:. It makes sense that Wingdings drew from printing heritage — the font goes back not just to the digital era, but hundreds of years before that. The Sumerians the people of southern Mesopotamia - now modern Iraq - whose civilization flourished between - BCE created drawings of everyday objects called pictograms.

In approximately 3, BC, Egyptian hieroglyphics showed symbols representing thoughts and ideas. These more complex drawings are called ideograms. With these new images and ability for individuals to interpret ideograms, more abstract concepts could be communicated.

An awesome fun fact is that these two designers were proteges of legendary type design Hermann Zapf of the ITC Zapf Chancery and Zapf Dingbats fame - also a collection of symbols. The couple also designed the popular face Lucida and Wingdings was designed to work within the same proportions as Lucida so the two faces could work together.

In , Microsoft bought the rights to Lucida and Wingdings originally actually three typefaces called Lucida Icons, Lucida arrows and Lucida stars and made it part of their beta test of Microsoft Windows that year. When the typeface was introduced into Windows, conspiracy theories began to surface that it contained hidden messages. ShortList is supported by you, our amazing readers. When you click through the links on our site and make a purchase we may earn a commission.

Learn more. This is the real, surprising reason why the Wingdings font exists Ahh, that makes sense. By Nick Pope. But there's a bit more to it than that, so have a gander at the video below Latest Computing.

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