Why use wingdings

Read more about the Mac version or the Windows version of PopChar here! Origin of Wingdings fonts The origin of Wingdings fonts goes back to the nineties when Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes designed these fonts as a complement of the already developed font Lucida. Access to Wingdings symbols But how can you find and access all those Wingdings symbols?

How can PopChar help me to use Wingdings fonts and their symbols? This web site uses cookies to provide best possible experience and service for you. By continuing surfing this site you agree to use cookies. Click here for details. 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. We know that Microsoft named the font "Wingdings" by combining "Windows" and "dingbat.

When using a printing press, printers needed a shortcut when it came to ornamenting their text. Every figure or letter had to be hand-carved and laid out before anything could be printed, so it was too laborious to make a new template for every drawing or figure.

Enter dingbats. Ahh, that makes sense. Its cryptic nature has even made it the subject of a few conspiracy theories, including one widely-shared hoax that it predicted the terrorist attacks of September 11th, typing in the fabricated flight number Q33 NY produced an image of a plane hitting two towers. Ahh, email chains. So to save us from our ignorance, Vox. Wingdings was created to be used as a unique tool for the pre-internet era. It was a bit like emojis, but way more useful.

It used to be much harder to use pictures from the internet. Images were difficult to find and too large to download, and they didn't play nicely next to text.