Today it’s easy to cut and paste images from the internet, but it used to be a lot harder. There were few ways to get images, files were way too large for puny hard drives, and they were of poor quality. Even worse, it was tough to get pictures to play nicely with text. Fonts like Wingdings provided a workaround by giving people high-quality, scalable images that didn’t clog up their hard drives.

“It turned out that Wingdings caused more excitement than Microsoft expected,” Bigelow says. “Conspiracy theories sprang up that Wingdings contained hidden messages.” Most famously, Wingdings supposedly contained anti-Semitic messages against New York City (when users typed “NYC,” the Wingdings for a skull, a star of David, and a thumbs-up appeared). Of course, Bigelow notes that the “hidden messages” were simply an accident of the font conversion process — Microsoft hadn’t considered that users would read the grab bag of Wingdings images as a code for actual letters.

Most of the Noramoji happen to be from the post-war period. They represent certain characters that are specific to the era, Shimohama says. “Black markets that are created in a post-war era resulted in many subsequent small businesses. The storefront and posters they created back then have completely different characters compared to the mass-produced, streamlined typefaces that are created by marketing/advertisement companies.”

Unlike most type design projects, which Schwartz called a “slow burn,” Neutraface took off quickly. Crisman—who studies the connection between art, culture, and gentrification in cities—recalled the rise of “gentrification font” as part of the post-Great Recession period when people were snatching up cheap houses to turn a “quick flip” with “grey paint, horizontal wood fencing, and adding house numbers using the gentrification font.” He described it as part of an aesthetic he called “generic authentic,” which attempts to convey a sense of “authenticity” through “classic typefaces, raw materials like wood and cement, and these nostalgic nods to older artisanal craft.”