Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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« Most conflicted "contrarian" story of the week | Main | Chris Ware vs. This American Life mashup » Wednesday, March 21, 2007Do you speak Dingbat?How do you recruit an expert typographer (fontographer, alphabetician, whatever you want to call someone who knows everything about typefaces) in a tight job market? The London-based design firm Lunar BBDO asked itself the same question recently. Their answer? A series of recruitment ads whose copy was set entirely in "dingbats" (picture fonts) like Webdings, Wingdings, and Zapf Dingbats:  According to CreativePro, the website that reported the story, this is not the first time that a stunt like this has been happened: Design rule breaker David Carson printed an entire interview with musician Brian Ferry in Zapf Dingbats in a 1994 issue of Ray Gun magazine. Although there has been speculation that the dingbat article was merely the result of an error in the production phase, Lewis Blackwell's '20th-Century Type' states that the use of unreadable icons was "Carson's reaction to the dull text." Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:56 PM
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