Webdings is a

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

dingbat In typography, a dingbat (sometimes more formally known as a printer's ornament or printer's character) is an ornament, specifically, a glyph used in typesetting, often employed to create box frames (similar to box-drawing characters), or a ...

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

developed in 1997. It was initially distributed with

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

4.0, then as part of Core fonts for the Web, and is included in all versions of

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

since Windows 98. All of the pictographic Webding

glyph A glyph ( ) is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A ...

s that were not unifiable with existing

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

characters were added to the Unicode Standard when version 7.0 was released in June 2014.

Symbol types

There are some "categories" of symbols in Webdings, i.e., groups of similar symbols. Symbol trends like this in the font include weather icons, land with different structures built on top, vehicles and ICT. Symbols which are the Webdings equivalent of characters not available on an English keyboard also exist in the font (for example, the dove and Earth symbols). An unusual character in the font is the "man in business suit levitating". According to Vincent Connare, who designed the font, the character was intended as a nod to the logo of the British ska record label 2 Tone Records. The character has since been adopted as an

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

: . Connare also designed the lightning bolt symbol to resemble the one on the cover of the

David Bowie David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer, songwriter and actor. Regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, pa ...

album '' Aladdin Sane''. Following the

controversy Controversy (, ) is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin '' controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an op ...

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.MS Denies Wingding Thing, Again, Wired Magazine
/ref> Webdings-big

Character set

Vincent Connare

The man who created Webdings also created several other fonts including Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS. Webdings was created due to the demand of the new digital age; hence Connare was told to draft up a font that was "creative," "friendly" and "hand-drawn". Jennifer Niederst, author of "Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference," talks about Connare's work with type, including Webdings. Niederst states in her book, "These fonts have generous character spacing, large x-heights, and open, rounded features that make them better for online reading," which further comments on the kind of fonts Connare was told to create.

Opportunities

People such as Karl Pentzlin have proposed that dingbat typefaces, such as Webdings, be encoded to Apple devices or more handheld devices in general. There are also organizations and individuals such as Michal Suignard who have created proposals for Webdings to be encoded in the "international character encoding standard Unicode". Both of these proposal examples also include other dingbat typefaces such as Wingdings. Webdings has also been used to help create artwork. In the case of Pat Boas, it has been stated that in Boas's work titled, ''Abstraction Machine'', she "began by typing 'poison' in the font called 'Webdings,'..." which helped Boas to create a painting that challenged the audience to de-code its meaning.Pat Boas Encryption Machine
/ref> Boas also notes how the artwork captures a dialogue between the Webdings typeface, which is based in logic, and the handpainted artwork, which is "sensuous".

References

External links