WHY THE RATHER CONTROVERSIAL 'WINGDINGS' FONT EXISTS

We have all stumbled upon this strange Wingdings font at one point or another, usually when you're browsing through your hundreds of default font's in your word processor program. But, it's so unreadable due to the fact that there are no letters, rather it's only made up of symbols!

So, why does this weird font exist? Well, as it turns out, Wingdings has a purpose. Back in the day, at a time way before digital printing, and even before typing, the printing process involved laying out metal stamps that contained a single letter. You would then have to have assembled each letter to make up a single word, then form words into sentences, then finally into your whole layout.

If you wanted to get creative with different printer font's, it would end up being a huge headache! The next best thing was – instead of creating a whole new font – they made what was called "dingbats", which were a collection of symbols used to decorate the blank areas of a page.

This was translated into the digital era by "dingbats" enthusiasts such as Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, who were responsible for the Lucida Icons, Lucida Stars as well as Lucida Arrows.

Microsoft bought the rights to these "dingbats" and renamed them to Windows Dingbats, or "WingDings" for short.

Some even consider Wingdings as the inspiration for the modern Emoji's.

Take a look at the video below by the YouTube channel, VOX, on Why The Wingdings Font Exists...