They were protégés of legendary designer Hermann Zapf, whose own Zapf Dingbats font, another collection of odd symbols, broke ground when it was distributed with Apple Printers in the mid-1980s. As designers of the font Lucida, they crafted pioneering type uniquely suited to the digital era (you can read Bigelow & Holmes's thesis on Lucida's unique traits). Two people made Wingdings happen: Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes (proprietors of the firm and husband-and-wife team). Fonts like Wingdings provided a workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that didn't clog up their hard drives. Even worse, it was tough to get pictures to play nicely with text. There were few ways to get images, files were way too large for puny hard drives, and they were of poor quality. Today it's easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be a lot harder. It was akin to emojis, but with even more utility. It was created to be used as a unique tool for the pre-internet era. Who made Wingdings - and whyĪs a means of writing sentences, Wingdings fails - but that was never its purpose. One of the creators of Wingdings, Charles Bigelow, of the legendary design studio Bigelow & Holmes, told me Wingdings marked one of the first times a font became part of the popular culture.Īnd when you delve into how Wingdings was born, it becomes clear why it become so iconic. In the early '90s, it was one of the first times people realized fonts could break through to the mainstream.

What is Wingdings thinking? Why would someone want to write a comma using a mailbox? Why would anyone think we want to compose in peace signs and crosses and heart shapes? The below is just a brief example of Wingdings weirdness:īut Wingdings is much more than just a quirky font. Wingdings is the font made entirely out of symbols.

True dingbat fonts