15 ms·
Which Emoji Scissors Close?
- haecceity 7y agoWhy does Facebook have 3 sets of emojis?
- Eikon 7y agoDifferent groups working on different projects, lack of communication and global company vision or even internal competition leads to wasting money producing the same thing multiple times. Basically the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, at the company level.
- tehlike 7y agoYou could actually end up wasting more money if you get "alignment". Thats why things take a shit ton of time for the most part.
- thatsenough 7y agoMove fast and duplicate things.
- mc3 7y agoMove fast and don't deduplicate things.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- onemoresoop 7y agoMove fast and complicate things.
- tehlike 7y agowhich is ok. we wouldn't have proliferation of software or arts if we didn't have desire to redo.
- thatsenough 7y agoMove fast and don’t deduplicate things.
- egypturnash 7y agoMove fast and don’t not repeat yourself.
- CGamesPlay 7y agoAlthough fun to say "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing", I think it's unlikely that the designer for Messenger didn't know that Facebook had emojis. In fact, the Facebook and WhatsApp scissors look similar enough in style that I wouldn't be surprised if they were drawn by the same person. I think the real answer is that they are 3 products with 3 different target users, and Facebook really wants to keep them separated in the minds of users (to keep bad karma from one brand tainting another). So, "brand differentiation".
- kryptiskt 7y agoIt's because they learned from how other dotcoms failed to capitalize on acquisitions by plastering their brand all over them and making them an appendix of the mothership, that would then usually wither and die. The most lucrative decision that Facebook ever made was not messing with Instagram, but keeping it as its own separate brand. And with that goes that it should have its own visual identity. Then they just applied the same thinking on several of their other properties.
- btown 7y agoEven if you don’t care about scissor physics, read the article for the A-level file pun, which is fully worth the price of admission.
- Gaelan 7y ago[0] is a twitter thread in a similar vein about train emojis. [0]: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790 https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790
- forgotmypw38 7y agoSadly, I only see the first image, and the rest are behind links. Each link requires me to press "Yes", before being redirected, sometimes to the intended link, others to the link I tried to view an hour ago.
- Gaelan 7y agoDoes this work any better? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1192557730709622790.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1192557730709622790.html
- jcranmer 7y agoInteresting how almost everyone goes for a 4-4-0 style train with the American-style balloon smokestack. It's funny that this is called "wild west" because it's rather anachronistic for that design. In the 1870s and onward, railroads are buying 4-6-0 trains instead of 4-4-0 trains. And the balloon shape is a feature of wood-burning locomotives (which produce a lot more embers and sparks than coal does). The Great Plains and Great Basin being rather devoid of trees, western railroads generally favored coal-burning designs, and so used much lower-profile smokestacks. The stereotypical "wild west" design is therefore closer to what you'd see in 1850s Ohio than 1870s Oklahoma.
- keith__talent 7y agoThis is a waste of time and intelligence
- benatkin 7y agoI really enjoyed this. It is very similar to "Please, enough with the dead butterflies!" [0] I'd like to see a list of everything like this. Similar to Awesome falsehood [1] but not quite. 0: https://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies/ https://emilydamstra.com/news/please-enough-dead-butterflies... ( HN 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 HN 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 ) 1: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
- Waterluvian 7y agoYes!!! I live for these completely pointless obsessions into a topic.
- benatkin 7y agoProfile checks out. todays.pointless.click looks good :D I started https://furious.engineering/ https://furious.engineering/ to add random stuff, but so far there's only one which shows the spanish equivalent of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th. I think these ones could be added to awesome-falsehoods. I'd love a list that was more centered on this idea, but for now awesome-falsehoods would probably be the best place for it. Maybe a design or visual category?
- uptown 7y agoI realize this opinion is likely to be unpopular, but this industry wastes so much time and energy on such irrelevant things.
- robbrown451 7y agoAre you talking about the article? Because the people creating the emojis clearly didn't spend a lot of time checking that the scissors would actually work, which it seems like you'd approve of. The article itself isn't so much "the industry" as a blogger just trying to write something amusing.
- sergiotapia 7y agoYou know what he means dude.
- robbrown451 7y agoI honestly don't.
- kempbellt 7y agoWasting time on irrelevant things? Like someone taking the time to post a comment about something they consider to be irrelevant? ;) I wouldn't consider this to be a depiction of the "industry". Someone pulled on an OCD thread and shared what they found with the community, and now I'll be on the lookout for poorly designed scissor emojis as a result... It was a fun read for me - one of the less serious posts for today being the kick off of a new decade. Reminds me of how there are so many colors of hand emojis now. I wonder if they'll try and make scissor emojis that represent left and right handed people equally at some point - letting the user decide.
- delish 7y agoIf "waste" is "many organizations making the same emoji," and if the alternative is a standards committee, I think standards committees are hit or miss. I'm fine with organizations doing it themselves.
- 7y ago
- ipsum2 7y agoAlong those lines, horse emojis judged by a horse enthusiast: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832?lang=en https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832?l...
- TimTheTinker 7y agoThanks for that - it was really fun to read.
- Redoubts 7y ago> OpenMojij 12.0 > Believe it or not, this horse's lack of eyes may not limit athletic performance. Many blind horses do well under saddle. However, the missing right hindlimb will severely limit potential for soundness even as a companion. Discuss euthanasia with vet. -20/10 Nice
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- valtism 7y agoAn entomologist rates ant emojis: https://curlicuecal.tumblr.com/post/175362924100/an-entomologist-rates-ant-emojis https://curlicuecal.tumblr.com/post/175362924100/an-entomolo...
- CGamesPlay 7y agoThese are so weird. It is strange to me that complaints about number of legs or the google ant's weird closer-middle leg passing under the closer-front leg are eschewed.
- b2ccb2 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17555842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17555842
- justinator 7y agoNow do, "what human figures in Renaissance paintings would not be absolute monstrosities in the Real World"
- karansarin1986 7y agoThere can only be one #1. Joypixels or LG?
- GuB-42 7y agoDepends if you are lefty or righty.
- kensai 7y agoI just adore that someone went the lengths to write such an article and someone else posted this on HN. So geeky and cool at the same time! :)
- rasz 7y agoReminds me of "Artist Asks People to Draw a Bicycle from Memory and Renders the Results" https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw-bicycle-from-memory-and-renders-results/ https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...
- Calcite 7y agoIn the MONA museum in Tasmania, they have real life versions of the “renders”. It was amazing to see the inoperable bicycles in front of me.
- weinzierl 7y agoInteresting and entertaining article, I enjoyed reading it. Now I want a "Which Emoji Weapons Shoot Real Bullets". I'm only half joking as many emoji sets transitioned from the depiction of real weapons to some form of toy, like a colorful water pistol. It would be interesting to find out who started it and when the others followed.
- surround 7y agoApple started it. For a time, a text like this: > Let’s meet at the park [pistol emoji] Would have have very different meanings between platforms. Eventually, all platforms followed Apple and switched to the water pistol. (The ones that still show real pistols are obsolete fonts.) https://emojipedia.org/pistol https://emojipedia.org/pistol At this point, Apple gets to decide what emojis look like, not the Unicode Consortium.
- ygra 7y agoUnicode doesn't decide anything about character appearance. Unicode is just about giving a character a number (among other interesting things for text, like collation, bidirectional text, etc.).
- michaelt 7y agoIf Unicode issue a standard naming U+1F49A as 'Green Heart' and all major platforms implement a green heart, I'd say unicode decided something about character appearance :)
- mantap 7y agoApple spearheaded this but you could imagine Facebook spearheading it and everybody else following. Honestly the original gun emoji was simply a bad idea because it makes it hard to make apps that are age-rated for small children when there's a fricking gun in the system keyboard.
- read_if_gay_ 7y ago
- userbinator 7y agoI'd never even realised that scissors could be right or left-handed, and now that I do, I checked all the (physical) scissors I have, and it turns out I have one left-handed pair and the other three are right-handed. I never used one after the other, so didn't notice the difference.
- matsemann 7y agoI don't really find that the way it's hinged make any big difference. So I've never used that to consider if a scissor is left or right handed. The problem is when it's not symmetrical. For instance the Fiskars [0], is impossible to get the thumb through when using the left hand. [0]: https://imgur.com/a/bN3XkHp https://imgur.com/a/bN3XkHp
- fanf2 7y agoIt depends a lot on how much slop there is in the hinge. Your grip should pull the blades together; if you use the scissors with the wrong hand it pulls the blades apart. The shape of the grips is just for comfort, the geometry of the blades is the true handedness.
- krick 7y agoSo, not only LG is the only manufacturer of more or less usable smartphones up to this point, but it is the single place that employs that only (as it seems) graphic designer on the planet Earth that can actually draw a scissors? Huh. It's a pity their advertising department sucks.
- tempestn 7y ago> The handles on these collide very close to the hinge, so they barely close at all. If you could file those parts down, you could close them a lot more: > But you couldn’t, because [edit: file emoji that HN strips out :( ] is the only file you can get in emoji, so this altered version doesn’t count.
- kibbo 7y agohis is very funny scissors
- PhilippGille 7y agoDoes anyone remember how Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, chimed in on the debate regarding Google's Burger emoji? https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/924487551372615680 https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/924487551372615680
- rendall 7y agoThis analysis assumes only 2 dimensions! I think the handles should be able to overlap somewhat. Some handles in real life do! "Critique" aside, I adore this site!
- Jolter 7y agoIt's very unusual to find scissors in real life where the handles overlap, so I think it makes sense to assume they don't. Read the last few oddballs, they are indeed expected to overlap.
- rendall 7y agoI just did now! And came back to comment how I had not read to the end! :)
- phyzome 7y agoWhen the handles can overlap, it tends to cause unwanted torque.
- starwarsguy 7y agothis is important
- progx 7y agoAbsolutly! First world problems are really important.
- K0SM0S 7y agoGoes to show that humor is a great tool to speak of important things! :D Also, funny that Apple should fail at skeuomorphism. [whistling face] This post was sponsored by the text-emoticon resistance.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI don't know wh0 this person is but they do good marketing - the "last post is either ..." is genius.
- aasasd 7y agoWell, I hoped to read a similarly opinionated piece on transporting convex objects on a camel :( But then I went through a bunch more posts, including one on how SVG renderers mix in background color before figuring out the mixed colors of objects—which seems obviously wrong.
- walterkrankheit 7y agoThis was cutting it close my best waste of time all day. :P
- rvz 7y agoThe latest responses to the grand unsolved question of "Which Emoji Scissors Close?" > Designers: What were the design teams behind these scissor emojis thinking? Some of the designs break made important design principles these 'scissors' should be redesigned by an AI. Dieter Rams would call this another level of wrongness. > HNers: Look at the intricate detail with all the designers from different companies attempting to create an emoji for a pair of open and closed scissors. Wow!, great analysis, so cool! > Everyone: It's a scissors emoji. > Me: Who cares? They are scissors emojis. Even if the designers can't create one closed so what, do a redraw later? I'd side with the everyone else crowd here, since the change will be so tiny that this storm in a tea cup will be a thing of the past.
- IgorPartola 7y agoThis is super amusing but also isn’t this like “which emoji faces have an anatomically correct bone structure?” Or “which floppy icons could be actual floppies?”
- pvaldes 7y agoOn the other hand, there is no danger of stepping over a design copyrighted by scissor makers if your scissors do not close.
- junga 7y agoMakers of non closing scissors might sue you if their business is not running well lately.
- amelius 7y agoThese are special scissors that have internal gears that allow them to be closed, even though it doesn't seem like they can be closed. The advantage is that you don't need to move the handles that much, and you train your hand to become stronger.
- q_eng_anon 7y agotake more adderal - you can't
- darekkay 7y agoInspired by this, I have written a similar post regarding the "parachute" emoji [1]. [1] https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/ https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/
- lifthrasiir 7y agoUnicode scissors emoji originate from two sources, and they both contribute to this plethora of non-closing scissors. First, Unicode scissors character (U+2702) originates from ITC Zapf Dingbats series 100 [1]. As a result they have, unlike most Unicode characters, pretty much standardized reference glyphs. And scissors glyphs do not completely close too there. Second, the original emojis were implemented in limited space (say, 16 by 16 pixels) and the design was constrained. In some platforms (especially SoftBank) they were animated instead, and indeed there were some reference emojis that close only in the animation [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapf_Dingbats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapf_Dingbats [2] https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#2702 https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#2702
- neop1x 7y agoWhat a nice century we live in that we have time for describing and discussing these kind of problems. :)
- mholt 7y agoThis reminds me of how someone filed a bug against a quick illustration I did of some cogs on my website because the cogs don't actually turn: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2949 https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2949
- adultSwim 7y agoNote that scissors cut well when kept partially closed (instead of repeatedly fully opening and closing)
- mdrzn 7y agoI appreciate the "My last post was about either Wire toothbrushes or Rasterization of coincident edges" bit at the end of the articles.