Who Designed Wingdings? Bigelow & Holmes and the Lucida Fonts
Wingdings began as three symbol fonts in the Lucida family by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Here is who they are and how their work became Wingdings.
Wingdings is so familiar that it feels as if it came with computers from the beginning. In fact it has a clear origin: it was built by Microsoft in 1990 from symbol fonts drawn by two type designers, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes. Their studio, Bigelow & Holmes, is better known for the Lucida type family, and Wingdings began life as three members of that family.
The short answer
Microsoft developed Wingdings in 1990 by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows and Lucida Stars, which it licensed from Bigelow and Holmes. The font first shipped with Windows 3.1 in 1992 and has been part of Windows ever since. The name blends “Windows” and “dingbats”, the traditional printers’ term for ornamental symbols.
Charles Bigelow
Charles Bigelow is an American type designer and typography historian. He studied at Reed College, and in 1982 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. From 1982 to 1995 he was a professor of digital typography at Stanford University, where he helped organise one of the first international seminars on digital type design. Later he held the Melbert B. Cary Distinguished Professorship at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He also received the Frederic W. Goudy Award in 1987.
Kris Holmes
Kris Holmes is an American type designer and calligrapher and Bigelow’s long time partner at Bigelow & Holmes. Together the two designed the Lucida family, including the symbol fonts that fed into Wingdings.
The Lucida connection
Lucida, introduced in the mid 1980s, was one of the first type families designed specifically for the low resolution screens and laser printers of early personal computers. It grew into a huge family covering serif and sans serif text, fixed width fonts for code, and symbol sets. One member, Lucida Grande, later became the system interface font of Apple’s Mac OS X for more than a decade, so many people have read Bigelow and Holmes’s work every day without knowing it.
The symbol fonts in the family, Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows and Lucida Stars, contained exactly the kind of practical pictures a word processor needed: pointing hands, check marks, arrows, stars, envelopes and office objects. Microsoft combined them into one font and gave it a new name.
How the pieces show up in Wingdings today
You can still see the three themes of the source fonts inside Wingdings:
- Icons: hands, faces, mail, office and computer objects on the numbers and capital letters, such as ✌︎👍︎☺︎🖂︎🖳︎.
- Arrows: heavy and outlined arrows, for example on Alt+0239 to Alt+0242, listed on the Wingdings Alt codes page.
- Stars: stars, asterisks and ornaments, including the black star on Alt+0171.
Browse all of them on the Wingdings chart.
Wingdings 2, Wingdings 3 and Webdings
Bigelow and Holmes did not design the rest of the family. Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 were developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. and are now owned by Microsoft, which distributed them with Microsoft Office. Webdings came later, in 1997, from a Microsoft team that included Vincent Connare. We tell that story in why Microsoft made Webdings.
Later work by Bigelow & Holmes
The studio kept designing for technology. In 2016 Bigelow and Holmes created the Go fonts, a set of typefaces for the Go programming language project, designed to be clear for reading code. It is a fitting continuation of work that started with making type readable on early screens.
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1982 | Charles Bigelow receives a MacArthur Fellowship and starts teaching digital typography at Stanford |
| 1985 | The Lucida family is introduced |
| 1990 | Microsoft builds Wingdings from Lucida Icons, Arrows and Stars; Type Solutions develops Wingdings 2 and 3 |
| 1992 | Wingdings ships with Windows 3.1, and the NYC controversy follows days later |
| 1997 | Microsoft releases Webdings with Internet Explorer 4.0 |
| 2014 | Unicode 7.0 adds the remaining Wingdings and Webdings pictographs to the standard |
Why this history matters for the translator
Because Unicode added these pictographs in 2014, every Wingdings symbol now has its own code point. That is what lets the Wingdings translator turn text into symbols that paste anywhere, without anyone needing the original font installed.
Frequently asked questions
Who created Wingdings?
Microsoft developed Wingdings in 1990 by combining glyphs from Lucida Icons, Lucida Arrows and Lucida Stars, licensed from type designers Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes.
When was Wingdings released?
It was developed in 1990 and first shipped with Windows 3.1 in 1992.
Who made Wingdings 2 and 3?
Wingdings 2 and Wingdings 3 were developed in 1990 by Type Solutions, Inc. and are now owned by Microsoft.