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Wingdings

Wingdings

by Microsoft Corporation
Individual Styles from $29.00 USD
Complete family of 3 fonts: $59.00 USD
Wingdings Font Family was designed by Charles Bigelow, Kris Holmes and published by Microsoft Corporation. Wingdings contains 3 styles and family package options.

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About Wingdings Font Family


The Wingdings™ 1 font was designed by Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow in 1990 and 1991. Wingdings 1 originally named Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars to complement the Lucida text font family by the same designers. Renamed, reorganized, and released in 1992 as Microsoft Wingdings(TM), the three fonts provide a harmoniously designed set of icons representing the common components of personal computer systems and the elements of graphical user interfaces. There are icons for PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse, trackball, hard drive, diskette, tape cassette, printer, fax, etc., as well as icons for file folders, documents, mail, mailboxes, windows, clipboard, and wastebasket. In addition, Wingdings includes icons with both traditional and computer significance, such as writing tools and hands, reading glasses, clipping scissors, bell, bomb, check boxes, as well as more traditional images such as weather signs, religious symbols, astrological signs, encircled numerals, a selection of ampersands and interrobangs, plus elegant flowers and flourishes. Pointing and indicating are frequent functions in graphical interfaces, so in addition to a wide selection of pointing hands, the Wingdings fonts also offer arrows in careful gradations of weight and different directions and styles. For variety and impact as bullets, asterisks, and ornaments, Windings 1 also offers a varied set of geometric circles, squares, polygons, targets, and stars. Character Set: Picture/Symbol

Designers: Charles Bigelow, Kris Holmes

Publisher: Microsoft Corporation

Foundry: Microsoft Corporation

Design Owner: Microsoft Corporation

MyFonts debut: null

Wingdings

About Microsoft Corporation

The Typography Group at Microsoft is responsible for both fonts and the font rendering systems in Windows. Since version 3.1 the primary font system built into Windows has been the TrueType system, licensed from Apple in a deal (with hindsight) remarkably beneficial to Microsoft. Working with Monotype, the Microsoft Typography Group produced fine TrueType versions of Arial, Times New Roman and Courier New, tuned to be extremely legible on the screen; these were all ready for the launch of Windows 3.1. Since then these core fonts have been developed to cover more and more of the world’s languages. In the mid-1990s under Robert Norton a program of truly new type designs was begun, using TrueType technology to render faithfully the bitmaps and outlines designed by Matthew Carter (Verdana, Georgia, Tahoma) and by in-house designer Vincent Connare (Trebuchet, Comic Sans). Until August 2002 these “core fonts” were offered freely over the Web, where they made an undoubtedly positive contribution in terms of legibility and font choice. In 1996 the OpenType initiative with Adobe was announced; this is touted as the end of the font wars’, whereby advanced multilingual text layout becomes available, native rendering of PostScript fonts becomes part of Windows 2000, and unwieldy font formats are rationalized. In 1998 the group announced ClearType. This is a very ingenious method to increase legibility on color LCD screens, individually targeting the 3 subpixels (red, green and blue) that make up each pixel. Such a leap forward in readability on these screens is a crucial element to the success of nascent eBook technology. Simon Daniels at the Group’s website keeps font fans and font developers up to date with most aspects of the digital typography scene, and communicates the technicalities of how fonts work in Windows. Updating us about the current (October 2000) activity of the Group, Simon notes: 1999 saw several members of the group leave to join Microsoft’s eBooks group. These included technical lead Greg Hitchcock, developers Beat Stamm and Paul Linerud as well as former Monotype hinters Michael Duggan and Geraldine Wade. The past twelve months has beeen a rebuilding period for the group, with numerous new hires [sic.] replacing earlier departures. The Group continues to provide font related services for Microsoft, and freely licensed tools and technology to the wider type development community. On August 12, 2002 Microsoft discontinued the free availability of the “core fonts”, noting that “the downloads were being abused” in terms of their end-user license agreements. Most commentators took this to mean the company objected to the fact that the fonts were being installed with Linux distributions.

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