An incomplete explanation of why there are four different mailbox emoji

[packbat]

Someone made a comment on the fediverse and got me curious about the history of emoji's four different mailbox symbols. Crossposting here because why not?

1.

The end of the story is this:

The goal of the Unicode Consortium in designing Unicode was to produce a universal encoding (uni-code) for all computer text. If they have done their job correctly, someone using a less universal text encoding system - Windows-1252, ISO-8859-1, SoftBank Shift-JIS, KS X 1001, CP 720, whatever - could convert that text into Unicode and back into whatever it came from with no loss of data. As much as emoji have become a huge part of what the general public associates with Unicode, their inclusion at all was a decision made because several Japanese cell phone companies - DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank - put picture-characters in the text fonts on their cell phones so people could share pictures like 😸 in their texts without the cell phone companies needing to actually transmit image data.

The different companies had different sets of picture-characters, and Unicode decided they wanted to include all of them in their universal text encoding. They also decided to include Wingdings and Webdings, and later added these characters to emoji.

2.

The beginning of the story is this:

If you are a printer publishing books using moveable type, it's relatively expensive to create woodcuts or engravings to draw decorative elements on the page. To this end, dingbats became a thing: pre-made pieces of type with little pictures like ❇ or whatever that could be used to decorate the page in publication after publication with little added expense. This concept persisted into the era of digital typesetting, with fonts like Zapf Dingbats by the legendary type designer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf allowing typesetters to add these decorative elements simply by inserting a few characters in a specialty symbol font.

Among those who made symbol fonts were USian type designers Kris Holmes and Charles Bigelow, the creators of the Lucida font family, and who included in this family stylistically-consonant symbol fonts for Icons, Arrows, and Stars. These three fonts were licensed from them by Microsoft and symbols from them combined to produce the original Wingdings - a convenient font for anyone who wanted to add some images to their documents without having to design or purchase such images special-purpose.

3.

This is as far as I have been able to trace this story this evening, searching the SEO-ridden husk of the modern Internet for articles, videos, and other reference materials. It doesn't quite - but almost does - answer the question, and that adjacent-to-an-answer is this: Wingdings, while included in emoji, was not designed for emoji purposes. Wingdings was designed for typesetting purposes. As Phil Edwards' I-think-accidentally demonstrates in a video for Vox on the Wingdings font, Wingdings allows someone to use text to "chronicle the saga of a mailbox": if one is, say, designing a UI or a book or whatever rather than being expressive in a tweet, multiple options for mailboxes makes sense for exactly the same reason that stars with a variety of different number of points makes sense. With emoji, we'll almost certainly never see a squirrel emoji because Unicode thinks a chipmunk emoji is good enough. When illustrating a book, as long as your list of options is not prohibitively vast, being able to choose between five different style of arrows means being more able to choose one that feels right and not just adequate.

4.

"Man in Business Suit Levitating" was intended as an exclamation point in imitation of Walt Jabsco, a fictional character in the logos on the covers of some ska records. That got added later, probably by Vincent Connare.

(Connare also designed Comic Sans, which a lot of people find ugly, a lot of other people find cute, and which actually proved pretty helpful to dyslexic people in some studies. I like it in some contexts but not others.)