❍✔✯♠: why we ❤ Zapf Dingbats

Last week, the typeface designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf died at home in Germany, aged 96. If there was such a thing as rock star typographer, then Zapf would be it. His fonts are everywhere, from the Estée Lauder logo to war memorials. He’s the man behind Zapfino, the calligraphy font that changes as you type so the letters join up nicely (a lifeline for my barmitzvah thank-you cards).

Yet Zapf’s most famous work contains no letters, but a series of stars, arrows, pointing fingers and fountain pen nibs. Zapf Dingbats was one of the first symbol-based fonts to be made available on laser printers, allowing everyone to use wacky bullet points in residents association minutes for ever more. Zapf Dingbats was an unusual symbol font: it had no thumbs up or thumbs down, but four different types of scissors and moe than 20 stars. It had no frowny face, but had a smiley face and a smiley face in inverse colours (perhaps a precursor to the current debate around the ethnicity of emoticons). Yet it marked the beginning of the use of symbols in word processing, changing for ever the way we speed-message our friends telling them we’re going to be late.

I asked Thomas Phinney, a font and typography expert and vice president of FontLab, about Dingbats. He noted that Zapf’s influence is such that while he was writing to me he was served a bottle of water with a label written in Zapfino.

“Symbol fonts such as Zapf Dingbats were especially handy in the early days of personal computing when integrating symbols and graphics into documents was harder,” he explains. “Because Zapf Dingbats was built into the first PostScript printers by Adobe, it became a standard. Among designers it achieved a legendary status when David Carson made an entire article about Bryan Ferry unreadable by setting it in Dingbats for Ray Gun magazine.”

Apart from making dull music interviews fun, Zapf Dingbats would go on to heavily influence the Windows’ Wingdings which in turn created the building blocks for emoji, the globally used set of symbols popular the world over because of their easy integration in messaging and social media. Indeed some emojis – such as the peace sign and the smiley face – have come to take the same keyboard shortcuts as Zapf’s original versions.

So here’s to Zapf, yes for his timeless contribution to typography and design, but also for his cool flower symbols you could use on birthday invitations.