The basic problem with emojis is the use of color of any kind, because a text string alone cannot specify the background that would make the emoji look good. (

The basic problem with emojis is the use of color of any kind, because a text string alone cannot specify the background that would make the emoji look good. (And besides, the look of each icon varies across platforms!) This to me is why emojis in fonts are so weird. Normal glyphs can be given a color (e.g. you have a red background so you make all your text white). Everything in Unicode can be reasonably changed to another text color, except for emojis. Heck, even old dingbat icon-fonts look good in any color! Emojis don't; they clash with practically everything that isn't a white background. For example, on my iPhone, I tried using an emoji such as "📞" (telephone receiver) in an entry from my contacts list, and sure enough that is allowed. The problem is, this string is used in many contexts: during an outgoing call, names are shown in white on an arbitrary image background; in the contacts list, names are black; and there are probably other renderings too. The plain text looks fine in every case because the OS simply changes all the glyphs to the appropriate color; yet the "📞" icon looks terrible on the call screen because its appearance is unchanged and it looks a blob of goo that's hard to distinguish from the background. There are usability reasons to have black-and-white icon designs, too. Mac OS X does this; such icons are less distracting and it's easier to see details at small sizes. Basically I think they should've taken a close look at what dingbats fonts were doing, and just extend that concept further to have a host of new black-and-white icons.