12 ms·

Noto emoji, a new black and white emoji font with less color

549 points by Vinnl 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
warning26 5y ago
I'm just happy the blob designs are back for it -- I always preferred those over the now-industry-standard "realistic" emoji designs that Apple likes.
- Avamander 5y ago
  I wish they had just fixed the inconsistencies in the original blobmoji font instead of scrapping them alltogether.
- ruined 5y ago
  >realistic assume a human is a frictonless sphere. given the skin color "default", solve for emotion rolling_on_the_floor_laughing
- bscphil 5y ago
  > "realistic" I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow - roughly, the sort of effect you would get from a static rendering of a cheap 3D model in a Unity mobile game. I agree with you, although I will say that the current version of the Noto Color Emoji font is (IMO) the best up-to-date color emoji, because it mostly eschews this fake realism that feels uncomfortable and disconcerting in other emoji fonts. I'd prefer hyper-stylized "blobs", but I think they deserve some credit for avoiding the worst of skeuomorphic design. See for example the "realistic" 3D rendering of the hand on the Apple emoji for "thinking face", it's firmly in uncanny valley for me. [1] The Noto emojis remain fairly stylized without being hideous like the Microsoft emojis. Google also deserves from credit for drastically improving the rendering of many of these emojis over time. This has happened quietly enough that I doubt most people have noticed. They brought back the more blob-like turtle [2], which really deserves to be compared to the horrible, awkward plastic children's toy that is the Apple rendering. Or take a look at how awful the gradients are on the Android 8-10 emoji [3] and compare to more recent versions. [4] I think we will look back at awkward 3D renderings in many emoji styles as a mistake. They remind me quite a bit of the terrible DreamWorks animation style [5] of the early '00s. [1] https://emojipedia.org/thinking-face/ https://emojipedia.org/thinking-face/ [2] https://emojipedia.org/turtle/ https://emojipedia.org/turtle/ [3] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-10.0/ https://emojipedia.org/google/android-10.0/ [4] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-11.0/ https://emojipedia.org/google/android-11.0/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Tale
  - thrdbndndn 5y ago
    I'm surprised that Apple hasn't updated their skeuomorphic emojis. They didn't look good even at the very beginning, and surely doesn't match Apple's design language/principle for.. at least 5 years. Apple is supposed to be the company that is obsessed with aesthetics yet they never update/redo the emojis.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Apple's emojis are fine. What's not fine is their treatment of them: apps can be rejected from the AppStore if they feature emojis on a screenshots, or have them on some button. What's worse, this rule is applied very inconsistently.
    - thiht 5y ago
      You realize not everyone thinks Apple emoji don’t look good? In particular in the younger demographic I’d be surprised if they were less liked than Android blob emojis. I mean, take GP’s comparison of the turtle, do you really think the Android ugly, and to be honest with a somewhat mentally challenged face, looks better than Apple’s turtle? Maybe you do, and maybe GP does too, but tons of people wouldn’t. I’ve never used that many emoji in my messages than since I switched to iOS because their emojis carry way more meaning to me.
      - thrdbndndn 5y ago
        Looking good is subjective, I was more saying that it doesn't match/fit with Apple's general aesthetics today. Apple dropped skeuomorphic style from their UI a long time ago.
      - ginko 5y ago
        Yes the android turtle looks way better.
  - derefr 5y ago
    > I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow No, not really; the problem is more, taking things that were originally introduced with the intention of being abstract pictograms signifying emotions; and adding enough un-called-for detail (i.e. details not required by the Unicode codepoint description) as to make things like gender and race seem like a relevant or even necessary property. Consider: in all modern implementations, "emotion" emoji are displayed with... heads. Opaque backing "vaguely skin-tinted" blobs at the very least; full-on human heads with ears and noses and hair in some fonts. They don't need to be. Nothing about the Unicode codepoint for e.g. U+1F603 "grinning face with big eyes" says the "face" needs to even be visualized as being on a head. It could be doing a cheshire-cat-smile thing, just eyes and a mouth — ":D" but rotated 90 degrees. And, in fact, that's exactly what it was, in the DoCoMo image-font, one of the three that led to the Unicode introduction of emoji! But for some reason, now we don't just have skeuomorphism (shiny eyes, pink mouths with tongues, blushing cheeks); we have these heads, and ears, and hair; and before you know it, people wondering why the head is yellow rather than some actual skin tone; or why the increasingly-less-generic face shape seems to be more masculine than feminine; etc. Why not just cut the Gordian knot? Get rid of the "head" part. Get rid of any part that's not required to communicate the concept. Make an image-font of only the Minimum Viable Pictograms for what each of the Unicode codepoint descriptions describes. Which is orthogonal to skeuomorphism, mind you. This isn't about whether a tongue has a tongue-ish texture to it. It's about whether you should include a tongue at all.
- Sqwandery 5y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one who loved blobmoji
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Back in the day when they were standard in Androids we received tons of complaints about our chat app from users, "why do you use these fugly blob emojis? Can't you have nice ones like on iPhones?"
  - signal11 5y ago
    I guess it’s very subjective and while I’m sure the blobs had fans, they just looked weird to me. And it probably didn’t help that WhatsApp had their own emoji on Android. Note that Microsoft also had to do a refresh of all their emoji for Windows 11. For now the Apple/WhatsApp like aesthetic is king. But it’s so fashion driven, you never know what’ll be in tomorrow.
    - endless1234 5y ago
      > And it probably didn’t help that WhatsApp had their own emoji on Android. Whatsapp just used Apple's emoji font on android too, for a long time. Eventually they drew their own, often mirrored, versions in the same style.
      - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        Telegram also used Apple's emoji, and what's unclear to me how they got away with it: I did search hard and could not find any information on Apple Emoji licensing or whether they can be used on other platforms at all.
- endemic 5y ago
  Eevee wrote about the industry mimicking Apple, and the downsides of that. It’s a great read if you haven’t seen it. https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/
notsound 5y ago
A mono version of this would be really neat for the terminal and to a lesser extent code.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
thematrixturtle 5y ago
Fun fact: Noto = No Tofus, referring to the blank rectangular frames you get when your font is missing a character. The Noto fonts are particularly awesome for multilingual text because they do indeed cover everything.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Interestingly, there is no actual "tofu" emoji, despite a huge variety of other foods having emoji representation. It was evidently proposed at one point, but rejected for some reason: https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html (page contains link to Google Doc with status of requests).
  - Tao332 5y ago
    Tofu I can understand. What would a tofu emoji even look like? A white brick? It's just going to be too confusing. But poutine was declined? That's an outrage.
    - ramraj07 5y ago
      Probably because any visualization of poutine which can’t clarify that it’s cheese curds not mozzarella will be rejected by any aficionado.
      - Tao332 5y ago
        You can't emojify the squeak.
reaperducer 5y ago
I'm not a fan of blobs as a replacement for human beings, but i can see how this would be excellent to use on an e-ink screen.
- throwaway847367 5y ago
missblit 5y ago
Google already had a black and white emoji font. I think from before color fonts were a thing. However they stopped updating that in 2015 (https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/commits/2f1ffdd6fbbd05d6f382138a3d3adcd89c5ce800/fonts/NotoEmoji-Regular.ttf https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/commits/2f1ffdd6fb...). This is likely a descendant of that rather than completely from scratch. It's also interesting they call out emoji being too detailed as a problem. For some characters like Pistol (apple-fied into Squirt Gun) they've copied Apples style -- presumably to avoid confusion. So acknowledging that not all fonts need to look the same is a bit refreshing there. Though of course the black and white pistol still looks like a squirt-gun
- ehsankia 5y ago
  > This is likely a descendant of that rather than completely from scratch. Given they're both called Noto Emoji, it's fair to assume so. Especially considering the new version also has gumdrops which are a classic of old Google emojis.
rejectfinite 5y ago
I like it. Easier to read. Nostalgic.
OJFord 5y ago
How did we arrive at worms representing people, and what happened to stick men (or women)?
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  PR is likely terrified of this headline: “Google removes skin color from emoji, making white the only option”
  - ARandomerDude 5y ago
    (on a white background)
  - cubefox 5y ago
    I also think that was the reason. Although it doesn't make sense, since on dark background (unusual on paper, but otherwise not to rare nowadays with dark mode in every phone) it would be the other way round. (The problem with blobs is that they can't display male/female faces. I assume they all just look the same then.) Who is at fault here? The cowards at Google who fear a PR disaster and self-censor in advance? The extremist minority which often generates similar outrage about such pseudo issues on Twitter? Or the journalists who willingly and uncritically spread and blow such outrage out of proportion without mentioning that the original source of the outrage was just a small group of social justice activists on Twitter, not "the public"?
- dspillett 5y ago
  They aren't a new thing. They were (though more colourfully) the default android emoji representation for a fair few years. For this font they probably started from an older one rather than from scratch, and decided not to recreate everything that could instead be human rather than more abstract.
yosito 5y ago
I hope these become more popular. I'm not a fan of the way cartoonish emojis have become so ubiquitous. I don't care for the aesthetic being plastered all over the things I use, but I do like the ability to use symbols to express emotion and other non-verbal things in written form.
- Avamander 5y ago
  Considering how few (web) apps allow you to switch to your system's font for emoji, I doubt it'll become very popular unfortunately
  - recursive 5y ago
    As long as I can do it at the browser level I'll be set.
    - Avamander 5y ago
      That's the thing, a lot of things bundle their own emoji "fonts" and allow no way to override. Your (custom) system font will only be displayed when the "raw" emoji is displayed as text without any modifications.
chki 5y ago
I don't use a lot of emojis privately but I especially do not use them in a professional environment. I think one of the reasons being that I dislike the aesthetics, which plays into another reason, which is that they "feel" unprofessional. (Although there is probably nothing inherently unprofessional to them, it's basically just a novel way of communicating). The blog post mentions increased interpretability and adaptability but I think making emojis more professional and aesthetically pleasing "in a professional setting" might be a big step as well.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  I don't know what's weirder, the idea of classy black and white emojis somehow being more professional, or the fact that I 100% agree. Seems sort of strange, but apparently color is a major factor in what I consider to be "professional".
  - bschwindHN 5y ago
    "Professional X" is just you getting paid to work on X instead of X being a hobby or pastime for you. "Professional" doesn't mean you have to be serious 100% of the time, let's lighten up!
- saila 5y ago
  It seems to me that emojis are pretty much required in many professional environments nowadays. E.g., if you don't tack an emoji reaction onto enough Slack messages you won't be seen as an enthusiastic participant, which could have negative consequences.
- CyanDeparture 5y ago
  To play devil's advocate (?), I use them all the time at work, I could argue that it makes me more efficient. Easier to react with a thumb emoji and grinning emoji than than saying "thank you very much for that". However if I argue that it's not strictly true, I use them because they're quick yes, but I also thin they're fun too. Edit - In the (?) I put a goblin and clipboard emoji to represent 'devil's advocate' but it got stripped out, if you were wondering what that was.
silveira 5y ago
I like colors. We have decent screens nowadays that can display a good amount of colors in a really good resolution.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
srik 5y ago
This should prove quite suitable for rapid web development, where most currently use svg-based alternatives like heroicons etc. I wanted to do a similar project in the past myself but stopped after realizing the enormity of the emoji set; I was also unable to come up with a way to deal with the lack of color in emojis like flags and as such have to tip my hat to their solution of just using country codes. Good work.
just-ok 5y ago
> black and white emoji > less color Am I missing something or is there some overlooked redundancy here? I was really confused reading the title. “What does less color mean in the context of ‘black and white’? Less grayscale, maybe?” I thought.
kenada 5y ago
Am I the only one who finds them hard to read at smaller sizes (when they’re in-line with text)?
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  You are not. At the very end of the article, right after "Happy emoji-ing!" I had to zoom in to see what they were. Previously, I could have seen them without issue due to the color variation. This is a step backwards.
- Hayarotle 5y ago
  Some of them seem specially hard to read. I mistook the phone emoji for a "missing character" symbol, the baby emoji for a hand and the dancing emoji for an Among Us crewmate with Elvis hair. The monkeys at the end also looked like some sort of ear at first glance. I like the idea, and most of the emojis featured in the article seem to be mostly fine at small sizes, but some of them don't really seem optimized enough to be recognizable at smaller text sizes.
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
Yay wokeism has infiltrated emoji
- flappyeagle 5y ago
  What are you even going on about. This is a line art translation of existing emoji
  - cubefox 5y ago
    They removed emojis with human faces. Likely they were afraid of pushback of activists who would say the faces are now all white (on white background) and therefore racist.
    - dspillett 5y ago
      Or¹ they started with the older Noto Emoji which already had the blobs because they were the Android default until ~2017. And some genuinely prefer the abstract/cutesy/less-human forms. [1] far more likely unless you are determined to be offended if a white human isn't the default representation of everything everywhere everywhen.
stemlord 5y ago
Emojis have always been yet another way to hijack attention on the screen. It is exactly why they've been so successful. I say "hijack" because the capturing of attention on the internet in 2022 is primarily a function of ad driven platform capitalism, the tactics used by players in this system being dishonest, nefarious, harmful. And while they succeed at this singular purpose they fail at the thing that actually made emoticons beautiful communication tools: their ambiguity. For example see the way the emoji lexicon had to be expanded in order to be racially inclusive. Emoticons never had this problem. A smiley is a smiley, simple, universal and forever. :)
stkdump 5y ago
Two comments regarding flags: it looks a bit awkward, that the letters are staggered instead of deformed according to the flag curving. A whole other idea, of how countries are identified without colors are the oval car sticker symbols. On cars they are getting less common, but they are still commonly used in printed international instruction manuals and warranty notes and sometimes even on product packaging.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  > oval car sticker symbols Unfortunately, international vehicle registration codes are NOT compatible with ISO country codes. It's not even close, IVH are variable-lettered.
- Tao332 5y ago
  > it looks a bit awkward, that the letters are staggered instead of deformed according to the flag curving The curving is supposed to indicate z-axis movement - a flag billowing in the wind. The deformation would be of a bulge/pinch variety and not just following the curve. Either way, it's going to be a lot less legible. > oval car sticker symbols Yeah, that would have been ideal. They wouldn't be flags anymore, but I think it's a better compromise. And like you observed, instantly useful.
mgdlbp 5y ago
Unicode already has a way to specify that emoji should be rendered black-and-white for consistency with surrounding text: affixing the combining character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (examples[0]). Some touch keyboards have the text-style variations in the flyouts. This only works on emoji for which a variation sequence is defined. Some emoji render the text presentation by default; you can choose the emoji presentation for those using U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16. Sequences also exist for ideographic variations like single- or double-storey 'a' and 'g', unified CJK, and miscellaneous ones such as serifs for certain mathematical characters.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols_and_Pictographs#Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols_and_Pict... [1] https://unicode.org/faq/vs.html https://unicode.org/faq/vs.html I find this tool handy for listing the Unicode characters in a string.[2] [2] https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8C%8D%EF%B8%8E https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8C%8D%EF%B8%8E Edit: An easy way to add the variation selector without a method for Unicode input (though there's a registry hack for Windows to enable Unicode alt codes): put the emoji in an address bar, then add the URL-encoded variation selector, %EF%B8%8E
- bscphil 5y ago
  Just for clarification: the variation selector for selecting text presentation only applies to emoji that have a text presentation, which is a subset of all emoji: https://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/emoji/emoji-variation-sequences.txt https://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/emoji/emoji-variation-seq... For example, there is no text style "pizza" emoji. This particular project is an attempt to provide a black and white emoji rendering for all emoji, which is distinct from the Unicode approach of allowing specific text / emoji stylizations for certain emoji.
  - eganist 5y ago
    > For example, there is no text style "pizza" emoji. https://i.imgur.com/S101VQD.png https://i.imgur.com/S101VQD.png Stock in Windows 10. I'm not sure how, but so far, the ones that didn't work were zero-width-joined.
  - mgdlbp 5y ago
    Interestingly, SLICE OF PIZZA (and many other unlisted emojis) can render as text for me (on Windows 10). Did Microsoft implement them out-of-spec? Here along with FIRE EXTINGUISHER, which doesn't: https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8D%95%EF%B8%8E%F0%9F%A7%AF%EF%B8%8E https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8D%95%EF%B8%8E%F0%9F%...
semireg 5y ago
I know this is morbid, but the first thing that popped into my head was tombstone engraving. Maybe it’s because I work in b/w thermal printers all-day every-day reminding me of the limitations of monochrome … and the shortness of life.
- make3 5y ago
  are you thinking of getting emojis engraved in your tombstone :) I guess this will likely definitely actually happen soon, if it hasn't for sure
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
nah
Vladimof 5y ago
> a black and white emoji font with less color
bushbaba 5y ago
So blobs are back. So google un deprecated everyone’s favorite blob emoji. Just to at one point in the future deprecate them again?
cubefox 5y ago
A related issue: Some random old, normal symbols are, for some reason, nowadays displayed by many fonts as emojis, i.e. as colored pictures. For example, the "left right arrow" symbol, commonly used in formal logic for "if and only if", now often appears white with a blue background: ↔. While others have been left untouched, like "left arrow": →. This is so annoying if you actually need that symbol in a logical context! Basically, they have made the symbol unusable in many fonts. They should have added a special emoji symbol if they wanted picture arrows...
- sebmellen 5y ago
  Proof of problem attached… https://ibb.co/G30YR3R https://ibb.co/G30YR3R
- saagarjha 5y ago
  More amusingly is that this is platform dependent. For example, on macOS ↩ U+21A9 LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH HOOK shows up as monochrome but on iOS it is rendered with colors.
  - cubefox 5y ago
    I also see the the color image on Android. That explains why some links (jumping from endnotes back to the text references) on old websites sometimes have this "emoji" in them...
  - rjh29 5y ago
    It's colour on Chromium on Linux for me!
- mmis1000 5y ago
  That is more a problem on mac. Windows still defaults these to white and black version, unless you prepend variant selector to optin into the emoji version. Some softwares do intentionally ignore the default and turn they into emoji (discord for example), but that is a software thing. And also, white and black rendering can be forced with variant selector if you absolutely don't want them to be emoji. (again, if software don't mess them up intentionally) See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_(Unicode_block) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_(Unicode... BTW, windows used to have a bug that its emoji keyboard outputs arrow without variant selector, so it is not even a emoji when displays on windows, but it is now fixed. Proper selector (0xfe0f) have been pretended to the character.
huxflux 5y ago
That's so racist!
saagarjha 5y ago
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest usecase for this font: Hacker News itself, which tries to filter out emoji to prevent comments from commanding unnecessary attention on the page. Doing this with text filtering is impossible, so the system has a lot of false positives and negatives. The site definitely should not send down a font to render a page but if major platforms adopt fonts like these perhaps it would be possible to add it to the font stack and open up the full range of Unicode for comments. (Also, Google’s site has such large margins that text is only a third of the horizontal width of the page. But I digress.)
- sebmellen 5y ago
  Agreed. Another commenter pointed out a related issue with logical arrow symbols. The exact issue they were talking about was reflected in the HN comment. See https://ibb.co/G30YR3R https://ibb.co/G30YR3R.
cush 5y ago
Google brought back the blob emojis! They are so good! Second only imo to the new Windows emojis
pfist 5y ago
I wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on the link, but I actually rather enjoy these designs. There's something a nostalgic about them, and the blobs work very well as replacements for people-oriented emoji. I may use this font in an upcoming project.
Tao332 5y ago
Trying it out now. I like how the nine different colored squares, circles, and hearts are now nine different fill patterns. You can still share a Wordle score with this font! Edit: Wouldn't be surprised if "can I share a Wordle score with it?" was actually one of the design criteria
donohoe 5y ago
Just want to add that Jennifer Daniel, the author of this post, is an amazing person and wonderful human being - aside, a great artist too. Checkout her substack: https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/ https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/ See also: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/11/1024802/jennifer-daniel-unicode-the-woman-who-will-decide-emoji/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/11/1024802/jennifer...
- barbazoo 5y ago
  I got that too after reading some of her work.
- CyanDeparture 5y ago
  OMG, that substack is fantastic, thank you for that, I've spent the past hour or so reading it - on the most popular emojis observable atm - https://observablehq.com/@jenniferdaniel/unicode-emoji-mirror https://observablehq.com/@jenniferdaniel/unicode-emoji-mirro... - which is fascinating.
sydthrowaway 5y ago
One question.. why?
joveian 5y ago
While still a work in progress (including rendering issues) there is also the open source OpenMoji that has both black and white and color variants: https://hfg-gmuend.github.io/openmoji/ https://hfg-gmuend.github.io/openmoji/ Personally, I much prefer the color and I like that those color emoji are flat 2D rather than the 3d that other emoji sets mostly use (although I'm not fond of OpenMoji's neckless people).
- ramraj07 5y ago
  I guess it’s subjective but my opinion of those is: yuckies
- schroeding 5y ago
  > OpenMoji's neckless people Legomoji, even the ":)" face matches :D
dorianmariefr 5y ago
On my phone I need to zoom to understand the 16px(?) emojis like the dancer
digisign 5y ago
It is weird that as GUIs went monochrome, text went colorful.
lcnmrn 5y ago
The problem with color emoji is that they aren't affected by CSS color value. If you want to turn black to gray in an emoji, you have to use CSS opacity. Then you will trigger a different algorithm to render text containing emoji in all browser engines.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
daptaq 5y ago
Is it only on my system, or does https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji show a mix of colored and black-and-white icons?
- GrayShade 5y ago
  Yeah, on Firefox / Linux, I get some from Twemoji.
- dspillett 5y ago
  All B&W on Chrome (Windows & Android). On Windows + Firefox I see a mix, so it may be a browser specific issue.
- Hendrikto 5y ago
  Works for me. The problem is likely on your end.
- rvschuilenburg 5y ago
  Same here. Firefox 99.0.1 on Windows 10.
xiphias2 5y ago
While I have seen another comment: ,,why?’’ and agree with it, I’d like to expand on it. For a long time I thought that switching away from 3d buttons, getting to less colors was only frustrating me and other techies who like how things were done before (I love the original iPhone aesthetics for example). But a few months ago my father died, my mother is left alone 73 years old, far from me, and I try to help her through phone (and sometimes remote sessions), but it’s extremely frustrating that she can’t tell me what buttons there are on the screen, because she can’t make a difference between buttons and text. With more black and white, I even can’t tell her what color to look for. And the worst thing is that when she can’t achieve something she needs to (like pay a bill), her blood pressure goes up, and she has to take medications with serious side effects. I’m very angry at companies that don’t test changes with old people whose life and health at this point depends on being able to use digital services.
- gfaregan 5y ago
  Wouldn't making the emojis more font-like be less confusing to someone who has difficulties with computers?
- clearleaf 5y ago
  Most people in my family older than me used to be fine with computers. They're much harder to use and more confusing these days.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    The first “computer” my grandmother used was an iPad. She has no idea how the pictures of her grandchildren end up on the screen with the envelope button (Email App). If I handed her a Mac (or god forbid windows) she would be way more confused. Even one 20yo. Today, the UI is more graphic and more simple than ever before BUT it’s decreasingly connected to the expectations of desktop computing. Many here on HN who grew up and professionally use desktop OSes have lamented the changes (“they’re bringing iOS to the Mac!”) that’s simply because we already had an idea of what idioms and UI patterns to look for. At the same time, we’re generating new patterns that aren’t grounded in historic imagery (and maybe have no research at all) and this is hard for everyone. Especially websites and internet activités. One example is the “x” to close a window. On a traditional computer, closing the window stops the application and it’s done. Meanwhile, minimizing the app keeps it just shifts the view. On a phone, you don’t really stop the application you just shift view back to Home Screen (you can force close but it’s not really needed). Phones don’t have the same UI at all as windowed devices. So it’s less clear what you’re doing on them. But websites… closing them stops them and today many websites are basically apps.
camillomiller 5y ago
Too bad it’s the Google-designed emojis. There has always been something off about the Android emojis to me. They just look less refined and just lower quality than Apple’s. Yet Microsoft’s and Facebook’s are even worse, straight into clipart territory
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- toto444 5y ago
  It is really a matter of taste there. I love Microsoft emoji and find Facebook ones very ugly.
  - camillomiller 5y ago
    Indeed! :)
iforgotpassword 5y ago
So we extended font specs to allow for colors specifically for emojis, needed to make font handling libs even more complex (on Windows you need to use Direct2D!) so we can finally make a font that's black and white and doesn't use any of that functionality, only to continue the ruthless strive for flatness, emptyness, simplicity in our UIs. I'm getting old I guess.
schroeding 5y ago
The blobs are back[1]! Yeah, that's rad! :D [1] Officially, they were still available as a font, some amazing people continued to create blob-moji for the new emojis since their deprecation: https://github.com/C1710/blobmoji https://github.com/C1710/blobmoji
jokoon 5y ago
That is really amazing, because it allows developer to directly integrate normalized icons into their apps. I planned to do it with godot, and apparently it means I can really reduce the cost of making icons, since those icons are free to use.
timnetworks 5y ago
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. no further comment.
pronik 5y ago
A long time ago, when I have been downloading the latest share- or freeware from Tucows, I've established a pretty good-working metric for when a software has jumped the shark for me personally. It was when a major release's biggest change has been the introduction of skins -- it mostly meant that the authors found out how to make them -- it has been the hype of the time after all -- and deemed them more important than other features. I get the same feeling recently with Emojis. They might be improving the fun factor of your software, especially if it's of a communications kind, but shoehorning them everywhere else feels wrong on so many levels. I dread to think of how many man-years have been put into getting emoji everywhere, in font development, standard bodies etc. for a miniscule increase in whatever better engagement in chat software actually brings to the societs. In a way that's me getting older, but also the feeling we are exchanging something valuable for colorful (and animated!) icons, also reducing the emotions previously nuancely expressed by language to a placeholder which is subject to interpretation.
xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
This is wonderful. Plenty of software does not support the sort of rendering necessary to support multi-color emojis. A single color emoji font has been sorely missing. - I can use these in any terminal that supports Unicode. - Any rendering engine that can fill a path can trivially take the output of a freetype parser and rasterize. Instead of having bespoke monocolor icons I can just use standard emoji and make them available to my users.
caffeine 5y ago
I think the point of this was to remove the genders, right? To avoid offending the people who get offended if genders like male and female are acknowledged to exist?
- thefz 5y ago
  That aside, the over-specialization of emoji has become laughable. If I want to ask a friend out for drinks I just need a generic drink-like icon, like a cocktail glass. I don't need all the variations between beer, wine, cocktails, shots, toasting glasses, bottles, and so on. It's the point of a hieroglyphic anyway, to convey a more articulated message through a simple image. The same with all the nonsense with genders, scarves, disabilities and skin colors. Let's have a round, genderless face of a color no one has, and move on. Nobody needs to identify with that anyway, it's a symbol like the gas pump on your car's dashboard.
  - caffeine 5y ago
    I agree with your sentiment, in fact the skin tones especially are a massive liability. Like if you mis-click by a few pixels in your corporate Slack, and all of a sudden you send the wrong colour thumbs—up emoji, now it’s A Situation.
cvburgess 5y ago
On my computer it appears that some of the glyphs are being "hijacked" by OS-level ones? [0] Im using FF on the latest MacOS. [0] https://ibb.co/hCMyr4d https://ibb.co/hCMyr4d
- bentinata 5y ago
  Same. Digging the repository issues I found this: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/issues/265 https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/issues/265

549 points by Vinnl 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

I'm just happy the blob designs are back for it -- I always preferred those over the now-industry-standard "realistic" emoji designs that Apple likes.

Avamander 5y ago
I wish they had just fixed the inconsistencies in the original blobmoji font instead of scrapping them alltogether.
ruined 5y ago
>realistic assume a human is a frictonless sphere. given the skin color "default", solve for emotion rolling_on_the_floor_laughing
bscphil 5y ago
> "realistic" I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow - roughly, the sort of effect you would get from a static rendering of a cheap 3D model in a Unity mobile game. I agree with you, although I will say that the current version of the Noto Color Emoji font is (IMO) the best up-to-date color emoji, because it mostly eschews this fake realism that feels uncomfortable and disconcerting in other emoji fonts. I'd prefer hyper-stylized "blobs", but I think they deserve some credit for avoiding the worst of skeuomorphic design. See for example the "realistic" 3D rendering of the hand on the Apple emoji for "thinking face", it's firmly in uncanny valley for me. [1] The Noto emojis remain fairly stylized without being hideous like the Microsoft emojis. Google also deserves from credit for drastically improving the rendering of many of these emojis over time. This has happened quietly enough that I doubt most people have noticed. They brought back the more blob-like turtle [2], which really deserves to be compared to the horrible, awkward plastic children's toy that is the Apple rendering. Or take a look at how awful the gradients are on the Android 8-10 emoji [3] and compare to more recent versions. [4] I think we will look back at awkward 3D renderings in many emoji styles as a mistake. They remind me quite a bit of the terrible DreamWorks animation style [5] of the early '00s. [1] https://emojipedia.org/thinking-face/ https://emojipedia.org/thinking-face/ [2] https://emojipedia.org/turtle/ https://emojipedia.org/turtle/ [3] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-10.0/ https://emojipedia.org/google/android-10.0/ [4] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-11.0/ https://emojipedia.org/google/android-11.0/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Tale
- thrdbndndn 5y ago
  I'm surprised that Apple hasn't updated their skeuomorphic emojis. They didn't look good even at the very beginning, and surely doesn't match Apple's design language/principle for.. at least 5 years. Apple is supposed to be the company that is obsessed with aesthetics yet they never update/redo the emojis.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Apple's emojis are fine. What's not fine is their treatment of them: apps can be rejected from the AppStore if they feature emojis on a screenshots, or have them on some button. What's worse, this rule is applied very inconsistently.
  - thiht 5y ago
    You realize not everyone thinks Apple emoji don’t look good? In particular in the younger demographic I’d be surprised if they were less liked than Android blob emojis. I mean, take GP’s comparison of the turtle, do you really think the Android ugly, and to be honest with a somewhat mentally challenged face, looks better than Apple’s turtle? Maybe you do, and maybe GP does too, but tons of people wouldn’t. I’ve never used that many emoji in my messages than since I switched to iOS because their emojis carry way more meaning to me.
    - thrdbndndn 5y ago
      Looking good is subjective, I was more saying that it doesn't match/fit with Apple's general aesthetics today. Apple dropped skeuomorphic style from their UI a long time ago.
    - ginko 5y ago
      Yes the android turtle looks way better.
- derefr 5y ago
  > I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow No, not really; the problem is more, taking things that were originally introduced with the intention of being abstract pictograms signifying emotions; and adding enough un-called-for detail (i.e. details not required by the Unicode codepoint description) as to make things like gender and race seem like a relevant or even necessary property. Consider: in all modern implementations, "emotion" emoji are displayed with... heads. Opaque backing "vaguely skin-tinted" blobs at the very least; full-on human heads with ears and noses and hair in some fonts. They don't need to be. Nothing about the Unicode codepoint for e.g. U+1F603 "grinning face with big eyes" says the "face" needs to even be visualized as being on a head. It could be doing a cheshire-cat-smile thing, just eyes and a mouth — ":D" but rotated 90 degrees. And, in fact, that's exactly what it was, in the DoCoMo image-font, one of the three that led to the Unicode introduction of emoji! But for some reason, now we don't just have skeuomorphism (shiny eyes, pink mouths with tongues, blushing cheeks); we have these heads, and ears, and hair; and before you know it, people wondering why the head is yellow rather than some actual skin tone; or why the increasingly-less-generic face shape seems to be more masculine than feminine; etc. Why not just cut the Gordian knot? Get rid of the "head" part. Get rid of any part that's not required to communicate the concept. Make an image-font of only the Minimum Viable Pictograms for what each of the Unicode codepoint descriptions describes. Which is orthogonal to skeuomorphism, mind you. This isn't about whether a tongue has a tongue-ish texture to it. It's about whether you should include a tongue at all.
Sqwandery 5y ago
Glad I'm not the only one who loved blobmoji
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Back in the day when they were standard in Androids we received tons of complaints about our chat app from users, "why do you use these fugly blob emojis? Can't you have nice ones like on iPhones?"
- signal11 5y ago
  I guess it’s very subjective and while I’m sure the blobs had fans, they just looked weird to me. And it probably didn’t help that WhatsApp had their own emoji on Android. Note that Microsoft also had to do a refresh of all their emoji for Windows 11. For now the Apple/WhatsApp like aesthetic is king. But it’s so fashion driven, you never know what’ll be in tomorrow.
  - endless1234 5y ago
    > And it probably didn’t help that WhatsApp had their own emoji on Android. Whatsapp just used Apple's emoji font on android too, for a long time. Eventually they drew their own, often mirrored, versions in the same style.
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      Telegram also used Apple's emoji, and what's unclear to me how they got away with it: I did search hard and could not find any information on Apple Emoji licensing or whether they can be used on other platforms at all.
endemic 5y ago
Eevee wrote about the industry mimicking Apple, and the downsides of that. It’s a great read if you haven’t seen it. https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/ https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/

notsound 5y ago

A mono version of this would be really neat for the terminal and to a lesser extent code.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

thematrixturtle 5y ago

Fun fact: Noto = No Tofus, referring to the blank rectangular frames you get when your font is missing a character. The Noto fonts are particularly awesome for multilingual text because they do indeed cover everything.

bscphil 5y ago
Interestingly, there is no actual "tofu" emoji, despite a huge variety of other foods having emoji representation. It was evidently proposed at one point, but rejected for some reason: https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html https://unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html (page contains link to Google Doc with status of requests).
- Tao332 5y ago
  Tofu I can understand. What would a tofu emoji even look like? A white brick? It's just going to be too confusing. But poutine was declined? That's an outrage.
  - ramraj07 5y ago
    Probably because any visualization of poutine which can’t clarify that it’s cheese curds not mozzarella will be rejected by any aficionado.
    - Tao332 5y ago
      You can't emojify the squeak.

reaperducer 5y ago

I'm not a fan of blobs as a replacement for human beings, but i can see how this would be excellent to use on an e-ink screen.

throwaway847367 5y ago

missblit 5y ago

Google already had a black and white emoji font. I think from before color fonts were a thing. However they stopped updating that in 2015 (https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/commits/2f1ffdd6fbbd05d6f382138a3d3adcd89c5ce800/fonts/NotoEmoji-Regular.ttf https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/commits/2f1ffdd6fb...). This is likely a descendant of that rather than completely from scratch. It's also interesting they call out emoji being too detailed as a problem. For some characters like Pistol (apple-fied into Squirt Gun) they've copied Apples style -- presumably to avoid confusion. So acknowledging that not all fonts need to look the same is a bit refreshing there. Though of course the black and white pistol still looks like a squirt-gun

ehsankia 5y ago
> This is likely a descendant of that rather than completely from scratch. Given they're both called Noto Emoji, it's fair to assume so. Especially considering the new version also has gumdrops which are a classic of old Google emojis.

rejectfinite 5y ago

I like it. Easier to read. Nostalgic.

OJFord 5y ago

How did we arrive at worms representing people, and what happened to stick men (or women)?

twobitshifter 5y ago
PR is likely terrified of this headline: “Google removes skin color from emoji, making white the only option”
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  (on a white background)
- cubefox 5y ago
  I also think that was the reason. Although it doesn't make sense, since on dark background (unusual on paper, but otherwise not to rare nowadays with dark mode in every phone) it would be the other way round. (The problem with blobs is that they can't display male/female faces. I assume they all just look the same then.) Who is at fault here? The cowards at Google who fear a PR disaster and self-censor in advance? The extremist minority which often generates similar outrage about such pseudo issues on Twitter? Or the journalists who willingly and uncritically spread and blow such outrage out of proportion without mentioning that the original source of the outrage was just a small group of social justice activists on Twitter, not "the public"?
dspillett 5y ago
They aren't a new thing. They were (though more colourfully) the default android emoji representation for a fair few years. For this font they probably started from an older one rather than from scratch, and decided not to recreate everything that could instead be human rather than more abstract.

yosito 5y ago

I hope these become more popular. I'm not a fan of the way cartoonish emojis have become so ubiquitous. I don't care for the aesthetic being plastered all over the things I use, but I do like the ability to use symbols to express emotion and other non-verbal things in written form.

Avamander 5y ago
Considering how few (web) apps allow you to switch to your system's font for emoji, I doubt it'll become very popular unfortunately
- recursive 5y ago
  As long as I can do it at the browser level I'll be set.
  - Avamander 5y ago
    That's the thing, a lot of things bundle their own emoji "fonts" and allow no way to override. Your (custom) system font will only be displayed when the "raw" emoji is displayed as text without any modifications.

chki 5y ago

I don't use a lot of emojis privately but I especially do not use them in a professional environment. I think one of the reasons being that I dislike the aesthetics, which plays into another reason, which is that they "feel" unprofessional. (Although there is probably nothing inherently unprofessional to them, it's basically just a novel way of communicating). The blog post mentions increased interpretability and adaptability but I think making emojis more professional and aesthetically pleasing "in a professional setting" might be a big step as well.

ravi-delia 5y ago
I don't know what's weirder, the idea of classy black and white emojis somehow being more professional, or the fact that I 100% agree. Seems sort of strange, but apparently color is a major factor in what I consider to be "professional".
- bschwindHN 5y ago
  "Professional X" is just you getting paid to work on X instead of X being a hobby or pastime for you. "Professional" doesn't mean you have to be serious 100% of the time, let's lighten up!
saila 5y ago
It seems to me that emojis are pretty much required in many professional environments nowadays. E.g., if you don't tack an emoji reaction onto enough Slack messages you won't be seen as an enthusiastic participant, which could have negative consequences.
CyanDeparture 5y ago
To play devil's advocate (?), I use them all the time at work, I could argue that it makes me more efficient. Easier to react with a thumb emoji and grinning emoji than than saying "thank you very much for that". However if I argue that it's not strictly true, I use them because they're quick yes, but I also thin they're fun too. Edit - In the (?) I put a goblin and clipboard emoji to represent 'devil's advocate' but it got stripped out, if you were wondering what that was.

silveira 5y ago

I like colors. We have decent screens nowadays that can display a good amount of colors in a really good resolution.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

srik 5y ago

This should prove quite suitable for rapid web development, where most currently use svg-based alternatives like heroicons etc. I wanted to do a similar project in the past myself but stopped after realizing the enormity of the emoji set; I was also unable to come up with a way to deal with the lack of color in emojis like flags and as such have to tip my hat to their solution of just using country codes. Good work.

just-ok 5y ago

> black and white emoji > less color Am I missing something or is there some overlooked redundancy here? I was really confused reading the title. “What does less color mean in the context of ‘black and white’? Less grayscale, maybe?” I thought.

kenada 5y ago

Am I the only one who finds them hard to read at smaller sizes (when they’re in-line with text)?

ARandomerDude 5y ago
You are not. At the very end of the article, right after "Happy emoji-ing!" I had to zoom in to see what they were. Previously, I could have seen them without issue due to the color variation. This is a step backwards.
Hayarotle 5y ago
Some of them seem specially hard to read. I mistook the phone emoji for a "missing character" symbol, the baby emoji for a hand and the dancing emoji for an Among Us crewmate with Elvis hair. The monkeys at the end also looked like some sort of ear at first glance. I like the idea, and most of the emojis featured in the article seem to be mostly fine at small sizes, but some of them don't really seem optimized enough to be recognizable at smaller text sizes.

amznbyebyebye 5y ago

Yay wokeism has infiltrated emoji

flappyeagle 5y ago
What are you even going on about. This is a line art translation of existing emoji
- cubefox 5y ago
  They removed emojis with human faces. Likely they were afraid of pushback of activists who would say the faces are now all white (on white background) and therefore racist.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    Or¹ they started with the older Noto Emoji which already had the blobs because they were the Android default until ~2017. And some genuinely prefer the abstract/cutesy/less-human forms. [1] far more likely unless you are determined to be offended if a white human isn't the default representation of everything everywhere everywhen.

stemlord 5y ago

Emojis have always been yet another way to hijack attention on the screen. It is exactly why they've been so successful. I say "hijack" because the capturing of attention on the internet in 2022 is primarily a function of ad driven platform capitalism, the tactics used by players in this system being dishonest, nefarious, harmful. And while they succeed at this singular purpose they fail at the thing that actually made emoticons beautiful communication tools: their ambiguity. For example see the way the emoji lexicon had to be expanded in order to be racially inclusive. Emoticons never had this problem. A smiley is a smiley, simple, universal and forever. :)

stkdump 5y ago

Two comments regarding flags: it looks a bit awkward, that the letters are staggered instead of deformed according to the flag curving. A whole other idea, of how countries are identified without colors are the oval car sticker symbols. On cars they are getting less common, but they are still commonly used in printed international instruction manuals and warranty notes and sometimes even on product packaging.

zinekeller 5y ago
> oval car sticker symbols Unfortunately, international vehicle registration codes are NOT compatible with ISO country codes. It's not even close, IVH are variable-lettered.
Tao332 5y ago
> it looks a bit awkward, that the letters are staggered instead of deformed according to the flag curving The curving is supposed to indicate z-axis movement - a flag billowing in the wind. The deformation would be of a bulge/pinch variety and not just following the curve. Either way, it's going to be a lot less legible. > oval car sticker symbols Yeah, that would have been ideal. They wouldn't be flags anymore, but I think it's a better compromise. And like you observed, instantly useful.

mgdlbp 5y ago

Unicode already has a way to specify that emoji should be rendered black-and-white for consistency with surrounding text: affixing the combining character U+FE0E VARIATION SELECTOR-15 (examples[0]). Some touch keyboards have the text-style variations in the flyouts. This only works on emoji for which a variation sequence is defined. Some emoji render the text presentation by default; you can choose the emoji presentation for those using U+FE0F VARIATION SELECTOR-16. Sequences also exist for ideographic variations like single- or double-storey 'a' and 'g', unified CJK, and miscellaneous ones such as serifs for certain mathematical characters.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols_and_Pictographs#Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols_and_Pict... [1] https://unicode.org/faq/vs.html https://unicode.org/faq/vs.html I find this tool handy for listing the Unicode characters in a string.[2] [2] https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8C%8D%EF%B8%8E https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8C%8D%EF%B8%8E Edit: An easy way to add the variation selector without a method for Unicode input (though there's a registry hack for Windows to enable Unicode alt codes): put the emoji in an address bar, then add the URL-encoded variation selector, %EF%B8%8E

bscphil 5y ago
Just for clarification: the variation selector for selecting text presentation only applies to emoji that have a text presentation, which is a subset of all emoji: https://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/emoji/emoji-variation-sequences.txt https://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/emoji/emoji-variation-seq... For example, there is no text style "pizza" emoji. This particular project is an attempt to provide a black and white emoji rendering for all emoji, which is distinct from the Unicode approach of allowing specific text / emoji stylizations for certain emoji.
- eganist 5y ago
  > For example, there is no text style "pizza" emoji. https://i.imgur.com/S101VQD.png https://i.imgur.com/S101VQD.png Stock in Windows 10. I'm not sure how, but so far, the ones that didn't work were zero-width-joined.
- mgdlbp 5y ago
  Interestingly, SLICE OF PIZZA (and many other unlisted emojis) can render as text for me (on Windows 10). Did Microsoft implement them out-of-spec? Here along with FIRE EXTINGUISHER, which doesn't: https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8D%95%EF%B8%8E%F0%9F%A7%AF%EF%B8%8E https://qaz.wtf/u/show.cgi?show=%F0%9F%8D%95%EF%B8%8E%F0%9F%...

semireg 5y ago

I know this is morbid, but the first thing that popped into my head was tombstone engraving. Maybe it’s because I work in b/w thermal printers all-day every-day reminding me of the limitations of monochrome … and the shortness of life.

make3 5y ago
are you thinking of getting emojis engraved in your tombstone :) I guess this will likely definitely actually happen soon, if it hasn't for sure

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

nah

Vladimof 5y ago

> a black and white emoji font with less color

bushbaba 5y ago

So blobs are back. So google un deprecated everyone’s favorite blob emoji. Just to at one point in the future deprecate them again?

cubefox 5y ago

A related issue: Some random old, normal symbols are, for some reason, nowadays displayed by many fonts as emojis, i.e. as colored pictures. For example, the "left right arrow" symbol, commonly used in formal logic for "if and only if", now often appears white with a blue background: ↔. While others have been left untouched, like "left arrow": →. This is so annoying if you actually need that symbol in a logical context! Basically, they have made the symbol unusable in many fonts. They should have added a special emoji symbol if they wanted picture arrows...

sebmellen 5y ago
Proof of problem attached… https://ibb.co/G30YR3R https://ibb.co/G30YR3R
saagarjha 5y ago
More amusingly is that this is platform dependent. For example, on macOS ↩ U+21A9 LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH HOOK shows up as monochrome but on iOS it is rendered with colors.
- cubefox 5y ago
  I also see the the color image on Android. That explains why some links (jumping from endnotes back to the text references) on old websites sometimes have this "emoji" in them...
- rjh29 5y ago
  It's colour on Chromium on Linux for me!
mmis1000 5y ago
That is more a problem on mac. Windows still defaults these to white and black version, unless you prepend variant selector to optin into the emoji version. Some softwares do intentionally ignore the default and turn they into emoji (discord for example), but that is a software thing. And also, white and black rendering can be forced with variant selector if you absolutely don't want them to be emoji. (again, if software don't mess them up intentionally) See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_(Unicode_block) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_Selectors_(Unicode... BTW, windows used to have a bug that its emoji keyboard outputs arrow without variant selector, so it is not even a emoji when displays on windows, but it is now fixed. Proper selector (0xfe0f) have been pretended to the character.

huxflux 5y ago

That's so racist!

saagarjha 5y ago

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the biggest usecase for this font: Hacker News itself, which tries to filter out emoji to prevent comments from commanding unnecessary attention on the page. Doing this with text filtering is impossible, so the system has a lot of false positives and negatives. The site definitely should not send down a font to render a page but if major platforms adopt fonts like these perhaps it would be possible to add it to the font stack and open up the full range of Unicode for comments. (Also, Google’s site has such large margins that text is only a third of the horizontal width of the page. But I digress.)

sebmellen 5y ago
Agreed. Another commenter pointed out a related issue with logical arrow symbols. The exact issue they were talking about was reflected in the HN comment. See https://ibb.co/G30YR3R https://ibb.co/G30YR3R.

cush 5y ago

Google brought back the blob emojis! They are so good! Second only imo to the new Windows emojis

pfist 5y ago

I wasn't sure what to expect when I clicked on the link, but I actually rather enjoy these designs. There's something a nostalgic about them, and the blobs work very well as replacements for people-oriented emoji. I may use this font in an upcoming project.

Tao332 5y ago

Trying it out now. I like how the nine different colored squares, circles, and hearts are now nine different fill patterns. You can still share a Wordle score with this font! Edit: Wouldn't be surprised if "can I share a Wordle score with it?" was actually one of the design criteria

donohoe 5y ago

Just want to add that Jennifer Daniel, the author of this post, is an amazing person and wonderful human being - aside, a great artist too. Checkout her substack: https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/ https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/ See also: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/11/1024802/jennifer-daniel-unicode-the-woman-who-will-decide-emoji/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/11/1024802/jennifer...

barbazoo 5y ago
I got that too after reading some of her work.
CyanDeparture 5y ago
OMG, that substack is fantastic, thank you for that, I've spent the past hour or so reading it - on the most popular emojis observable atm - https://observablehq.com/@jenniferdaniel/unicode-emoji-mirror https://observablehq.com/@jenniferdaniel/unicode-emoji-mirro... - which is fascinating.

sydthrowaway 5y ago

One question.. why?

joveian 5y ago

While still a work in progress (including rendering issues) there is also the open source OpenMoji that has both black and white and color variants: https://hfg-gmuend.github.io/openmoji/ https://hfg-gmuend.github.io/openmoji/ Personally, I much prefer the color and I like that those color emoji are flat 2D rather than the 3d that other emoji sets mostly use (although I'm not fond of OpenMoji's neckless people).

ramraj07 5y ago
I guess it’s subjective but my opinion of those is: yuckies
schroeding 5y ago
> OpenMoji's neckless people Legomoji, even the ":)" face matches :D

dorianmariefr 5y ago

On my phone I need to zoom to understand the 16px(?) emojis like the dancer

digisign 5y ago

It is weird that as GUIs went monochrome, text went colorful.

lcnmrn 5y ago

The problem with color emoji is that they aren't affected by CSS color value. If you want to turn black to gray in an emoji, you have to use CSS opacity. Then you will trigger a different algorithm to render text containing emoji in all browser engines.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

daptaq 5y ago

Is it only on my system, or does https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji show a mix of colored and black-and-white icons?

GrayShade 5y ago
Yeah, on Firefox / Linux, I get some from Twemoji.
dspillett 5y ago
All B&W on Chrome (Windows & Android). On Windows + Firefox I see a mix, so it may be a browser specific issue.
Hendrikto 5y ago
Works for me. The problem is likely on your end.
rvschuilenburg 5y ago
Same here. Firefox 99.0.1 on Windows 10.

xiphias2 5y ago

While I have seen another comment: ,,why?’’ and agree with it, I’d like to expand on it. For a long time I thought that switching away from 3d buttons, getting to less colors was only frustrating me and other techies who like how things were done before (I love the original iPhone aesthetics for example). But a few months ago my father died, my mother is left alone 73 years old, far from me, and I try to help her through phone (and sometimes remote sessions), but it’s extremely frustrating that she can’t tell me what buttons there are on the screen, because she can’t make a difference between buttons and text. With more black and white, I even can’t tell her what color to look for. And the worst thing is that when she can’t achieve something she needs to (like pay a bill), her blood pressure goes up, and she has to take medications with serious side effects. I’m very angry at companies that don’t test changes with old people whose life and health at this point depends on being able to use digital services.

gfaregan 5y ago
Wouldn't making the emojis more font-like be less confusing to someone who has difficulties with computers?
clearleaf 5y ago
Most people in my family older than me used to be fine with computers. They're much harder to use and more confusing these days.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  The first “computer” my grandmother used was an iPad. She has no idea how the pictures of her grandchildren end up on the screen with the envelope button (Email App). If I handed her a Mac (or god forbid windows) she would be way more confused. Even one 20yo. Today, the UI is more graphic and more simple than ever before BUT it’s decreasingly connected to the expectations of desktop computing. Many here on HN who grew up and professionally use desktop OSes have lamented the changes (“they’re bringing iOS to the Mac!”) that’s simply because we already had an idea of what idioms and UI patterns to look for. At the same time, we’re generating new patterns that aren’t grounded in historic imagery (and maybe have no research at all) and this is hard for everyone. Especially websites and internet activités. One example is the “x” to close a window. On a traditional computer, closing the window stops the application and it’s done. Meanwhile, minimizing the app keeps it just shifts the view. On a phone, you don’t really stop the application you just shift view back to Home Screen (you can force close but it’s not really needed). Phones don’t have the same UI at all as windowed devices. So it’s less clear what you’re doing on them. But websites… closing them stops them and today many websites are basically apps.

camillomiller 5y ago

Too bad it’s the Google-designed emojis. There has always been something off about the Android emojis to me. They just look less refined and just lower quality than Apple’s. Yet Microsoft’s and Facebook’s are even worse, straight into clipart territory

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
toto444 5y ago
It is really a matter of taste there. I love Microsoft emoji and find Facebook ones very ugly.
- camillomiller 5y ago
  Indeed! :)

iforgotpassword 5y ago

So we extended font specs to allow for colors specifically for emojis, needed to make font handling libs even more complex (on Windows you need to use Direct2D!) so we can finally make a font that's black and white and doesn't use any of that functionality, only to continue the ruthless strive for flatness, emptyness, simplicity in our UIs. I'm getting old I guess.

schroeding 5y ago

The blobs are back[1]! Yeah, that's rad! :D [1] Officially, they were still available as a font, some amazing people continued to create blob-moji for the new emojis since their deprecation: https://github.com/C1710/blobmoji https://github.com/C1710/blobmoji

jokoon 5y ago

That is really amazing, because it allows developer to directly integrate normalized icons into their apps. I planned to do it with godot, and apparently it means I can really reduce the cost of making icons, since those icons are free to use.

timnetworks 5y ago

booooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. no further comment.

pronik 5y ago

A long time ago, when I have been downloading the latest share- or freeware from Tucows, I've established a pretty good-working metric for when a software has jumped the shark for me personally. It was when a major release's biggest change has been the introduction of skins -- it mostly meant that the authors found out how to make them -- it has been the hype of the time after all -- and deemed them more important than other features. I get the same feeling recently with Emojis. They might be improving the fun factor of your software, especially if it's of a communications kind, but shoehorning them everywhere else feels wrong on so many levels. I dread to think of how many man-years have been put into getting emoji everywhere, in font development, standard bodies etc. for a miniscule increase in whatever better engagement in chat software actually brings to the societs. In a way that's me getting older, but also the feeling we are exchanging something valuable for colorful (and animated!) icons, also reducing the emotions previously nuancely expressed by language to a placeholder which is subject to interpretation.

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago

This is wonderful. Plenty of software does not support the sort of rendering necessary to support multi-color emojis. A single color emoji font has been sorely missing. - I can use these in any terminal that supports Unicode. - Any rendering engine that can fill a path can trivially take the output of a freetype parser and rasterize. Instead of having bespoke monocolor icons I can just use standard emoji and make them available to my users.

caffeine 5y ago

I think the point of this was to remove the genders, right? To avoid offending the people who get offended if genders like male and female are acknowledged to exist?

thefz 5y ago
That aside, the over-specialization of emoji has become laughable. If I want to ask a friend out for drinks I just need a generic drink-like icon, like a cocktail glass. I don't need all the variations between beer, wine, cocktails, shots, toasting glasses, bottles, and so on. It's the point of a hieroglyphic anyway, to convey a more articulated message through a simple image. The same with all the nonsense with genders, scarves, disabilities and skin colors. Let's have a round, genderless face of a color no one has, and move on. Nobody needs to identify with that anyway, it's a symbol like the gas pump on your car's dashboard.
- caffeine 5y ago
  I agree with your sentiment, in fact the skin tones especially are a massive liability. Like if you mis-click by a few pixels in your corporate Slack, and all of a sudden you send the wrong colour thumbs—up emoji, now it’s A Situation.

cvburgess 5y ago

On my computer it appears that some of the glyphs are being "hijacked" by OS-level ones? [0] Im using FF on the latest MacOS. [0] https://ibb.co/hCMyr4d https://ibb.co/hCMyr4d

bentinata 5y ago
Same. Digging the repository issues I found this: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/issues/265 https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji/issues/265