6 ms·

Why the Wingdings Font Exists (2015)

86 points by davidhariri 6y ago

jnwatson 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    Yep, we rediscovered them, then we rediscovered they were bad (on the web) https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/ https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/
- duskwuff 6y 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 6y ago
  And who could forget Cairo ShootOut? https://macintoshgarden.org/games/cairo-shootout https://macintoshgarden.org/games/cairo-shootout (God rest your soul, Mr. Blehm.)
michaelt 6y 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_attachments/296931/Mooretronics_Font-795x122.png https://techdocs.altium.com/sites/default/files/resize/wiki_...
- knolax 6y ago
  Seems like a massive oversight given most PCB files are just a bunch of glorified vector images.
dhosek 6y 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.
- dhosek 6y 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 6y ago
    This sounds like a inverse of "kidnapped people are usually famous and famous people have their name in the paper."
    - dhosek 6y ago
      Yeah, I wish I could find that article because it was full of a lot of specious reasoning.
- jansan 6y 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 6y ago
    That is intentional and was a direct reaction to the original controversy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rgaino 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    Yes, I do believe that's the reason the story was related.
- tricky 6y 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 6y 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. :)
- gmueckl 6y 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...
  - datameta 6y 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.
    - gmueckl 6y ago
      Well, it's not like low quality LCDs don't suffer from burn in like effects, either. But the way the screen saver settings have been hidden away suggests that this feature is pretty much on life support. It's just much better to send the screen into standby.
      - datameta 6y ago
        Image persistence can potentially be a thing with some LCDs but I honestly don't remember seeing it for years now even in the most brutal edge case scenarios.
gayprogrammer 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
Hmph. I always thought of Wingdings as an unimaginative version of Susan Kare's Cairo, sans dogcow.

86 points by davidhariri 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  Yep, we rediscovered them, then we rediscovered they were bad (on the web) https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/ https://github.blog/2016-02-22-delivering-octicons-with-svg/
duskwuff 6y 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 6y ago
And who could forget Cairo ShootOut? https://macintoshgarden.org/games/cairo-shootout https://macintoshgarden.org/games/cairo-shootout (God rest your soul, Mr. Blehm.)

michaelt 6y 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_attachments/296931/Mooretronics_Font-795x122.png https://techdocs.altium.com/sites/default/files/resize/wiki_...

knolax 6y ago
Seems like a massive oversight given most PCB files are just a bunch of glorified vector images.

dhosek 6y 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.

dhosek 6y 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 6y ago
  This sounds like a inverse of "kidnapped people are usually famous and famous people have their name in the paper."
  - dhosek 6y ago
    Yeah, I wish I could find that article because it was full of a lot of specious reasoning.
jansan 6y 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 6y ago
  That is intentional and was a direct reaction to the original controversy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rgaino 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  Yes, I do believe that's the reason the story was related.
tricky 6y 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 6y 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. :)

gmueckl 6y 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...
- datameta 6y 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.
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    Well, it's not like low quality LCDs don't suffer from burn in like effects, either. But the way the screen saver settings have been hidden away suggests that this feature is pretty much on life support. It's just much better to send the screen into standby.
    - datameta 6y ago
      Image persistence can potentially be a thing with some LCDs but I honestly don't remember seeing it for years now even in the most brutal edge case scenarios.

gayprogrammer 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

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