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Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018-2026
- ashton314 9mo agoI wonder how hard some folks ant Apple had to work to keep Alan Dye away from the Emoji design.
- codethief 9mo ago> Described as "emoji fragmentation" by some, it was clear that various emoji vendors' designs were highly inconsistent with one another, often leading to embarrassing miscommunications. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.
- adzm 9mo agoI'd say it has worked pretty well with a few notable exceptions.
- AlienRobot 9mo agoWith a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ https://www.hyrumslaw.com/
- idle_zealot 9mo agoI fantasize about a world in which Unicode standardized a 16x16 and 32x32 bitmap format. Early emoji were designed for display at low resolutions like those. Your phone could send a character sequence that decodes to a PNG image or something and then all emoji would be accurately sent and displayed as intended. If you wanted efficient support for the original emoji baked into Japanese cell phones you could define specific code points to be semantically equivalent to the sequence encoding the exact legacy bitmap.
- RandomTeaParty 9mo agoEmoji look isn't standardized for the same reason letters look isn't - because it is font detail Imagine outlawing comic sans because "letters must be serious" or smth
- codethief 9mo agoBut the font design typically doesn't influence or change the meaning of the text. With emojis it does. …and that's precisely why I complained that emojis have been standardized as Unicode code points, with their design being left to font designers. You just re-iterated that this is a consequence of using (abusing) the charset, which I had already acknowledged.
- contagiousflow 9mo agoWith the Iran example, it's an interesting world we live in where the design of an emoji by some of the largest companies in the world can support or detract recognition of new states. Especially with some of these tech companies bending the knee to the current US administration I could imagine a world where there are executive orders to say, remove the Greenland flag, or change the design of the Venezuela flag.
- GaggiX 9mo agoWell the Taiwan flag doesn't appear on mainland china phones, I think the phone does fall back to the TW letters.
- Thorrez 9mo agoApple originally had a bug in that censorship code. It would crash your phone if you received a text with the Taiwan flag. https://objective-see.org/blog/blog_0x34.html https://objective-see.org/blog/blog_0x34.html
- xcf_seetan 9mo agoAs someone that used the original emotes, all this graphics emojis just don't make any sense. There are just too many, and i have to lookup what they mean in isolation and try to dig what they mean in sequence... I dont have the context the user had when he constructed the sequence of emojis and i cant understand what they are trying to communicate, at this point it is easier to just say the words.
- graemep 9mo agoThere are too many, and there are a ridiculous number of variants. Why do we need options for the skin colour of an emoji? How on earth does it change the meaning of a smiley or a face palm? Faces with different hair colours too! Clocks with hands at different times?
- neogodless 9mo agoWhich skin color should all emoji be? https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066ff90c69.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066...
- KptMarchewa 9mo agoOriginal bright yellow was a good candidate, since actually no one looks like this.
- F3nd0 9mo agoWhy should skin colour be specified at all? Why not leave it as an implementation detail? Yellow is the popular default choice, but it could very well be green, blue, pink, or anything really.
- tehjoker 9mo agowhy not let people just pick which one they want to use
- baggy_trough 9mo agoStill mad that the gun was nerfed.
- AlienRobot 9mo agoIt's pure insanity to me that someone literally writes "gun" in 2013 and tech companies can retroactively rewrite what they said to "toy gun" in 2018. If emojis were really text this would be a clear violation of data integrity.
- windows2020 9mo agoNot much of a difference between replacing a gun emoji with a water gun and find replacing "gun" with "water gun"
- baggy_trough 9mo agoI would say that was a very large difference indeed.
- baggy_trough 9mo agoOops, I misunderstood your comment.
- AlienRobot 9mo agoI think this article just makes the case for what incredibly terrible idea emojis are in general. Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like. I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.
- epolanski 9mo agoIdk, I don't mind them. It's not that much of an issue and we largely converged.
- llbbdd 9mo agoI'm not sure that's any different from reading any historical text other than perhaps the abbreviated timeline. Written language always requires some context about when it was written to accurately parse, it's just less obvious for writing that isn't all that old. Modern prints of classic or historical writings sometimes have footnotes clarifying meanings that have changed over time; I don't know if it's happened yet, but I can definitely imagine a footnote clarifying e.g. "this tweet was written when the gun emoji still looked like a gun and this was meant to be more threatening than it appears now"
- binary132 9mo agoI really preferred the norm being text emojis. This whole thing with gender- and ethnicity- and now other-stuff-encoded emojis is just really awkward and forced seeming to me. A text smiley is just a smiley.
- kilroy123 9mo agoShameless plug, but if you want to see more about emojis. I made a museum: https://emojistime.com/museum https://emojistime.com/museum
- xcf_seetan 9mo agoI can see you forgot most of the text ones from circa 1998. :) :( :p :/ 8) :D XD :* and so on... mostly from IRC times.
- augusteo 9mo agoThe Unicode approach seems backwards in hindsight, but I wonder if it was the only practical path forward at the time. Getting Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft to agree on exact pixel-level designs would've been a nightmare. Code points at least let everyone participate without vendor lock-in. What's interesting is how the market solved it anyway—everyone just converged on Apple's designs because that's what users expected. Not through spec, but through sheer gravity.
- jorvi 9mo agoThe market hasn't solved it though, there's plenty of emoji where the difference between the Apple / Google / Samsung / Microsoft / Twemoji is divergent enough that it expresses a different sentiment.
- Oarch 9mo agoThe Toss emojis at the end of the article are surprisingly artful!
- normie3000 9mo agoShame, I was hoping they'd introduced a "hand tossing" emoji.