Human stories behind emoji designs | Hacker News Reader

Human stories behind emoji designs

bbc.com

63 pointsshivbhatt24 comments

I have my own little-known human story. I was missing a knight emoji for some personal project and decided to make a request to the unicode consortium. The problem is I can't draw. I asked if someone could make one knight emoji for free on r/characterdrawing . Someone gracefully accepted to make one and our submission is now 'Under Consideration'.

https://old.reddit.com/r/characterdrawing/comments/mw0wy9/rf...

You can definitely learn to draw, if you want. It just takes practice. I used to think I couldn't draw, but after taking a painting class, I learned that it's much more technique (and less intuition) than you might think.

If you can't draw, do pixel art.

I can't draw, but my kid likes to draw while I sit with her at the dinner table. I didn't know what to do, so I grabbed some graph paper and drew a 5x5 pixelated kitty which she found very funny.

I never used emojis in my private life until I started working as a software developer. I end up using them all day, everyday on Slack at work and now they have bled into my vocabulary everywhere.

I preferred simple smileys and have used them privately in the IRC days. But emoji actually have more variety, color-wise. I recently started dating and it's incredibly wholesome to get a heart emoji, which comes in a dozen or so colors.

What's funny about that particular emoji, is that the hearts are actually different, separate emoji. While many others, like the U+1F9D1 PERSON emoji, can be combined with skin tones.

I'm not quite certain why there isn't a simple HEART emoji, modified with a color but it's probably historical.

I believe the emoji modifiers appeared much later than the hearts variations. The red heart is also an OG emoji and variations, such as broken heart (2010) and purple heart (2010) came much later. The skin tone modifiers seem to appear in 2017, and some other joined emoji seem to date back to 2015 [2]. So in summary, it's historical and changing it would break unicode.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/search/?q=heart [2] https://emojipedia.org/eye-in-speech-bubble/

The hearts also used to have conflicting descriptions, or at least confusing templates. The charming hairy heart from Android 4.4 was fun.

https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/

My problem is every chat app now interprets :) as an emoji.

At least you seem happy about that.

The Chinese-American emoji are not loved by all users with a Chinese background.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/the-w...

Something like a gaiwan, a rice cooker or a jar of lao gan ma would be more iconic?

I still like emoji, but I feel there is a heavy Western bias seeping into them. I am curious it the vendors will allow the Afghanistan flag to be changed if the Taliban stays in power. Seems less controversial on a global perspective than a trans flag.

Rice cookers are Japanese! That’s cultural appropriation!

Of course I’m joking, but you can see how hard it is to please everyone.

Then it’ll fit right in with the unified CJK ideographs!

The podcast this story is from has been pretty interesting if you're interested in the social side of technology.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09ndpbv

As much as I miss people using old-school smilies, emoji really have enriched things like Slack a lot for me. However I think in Slack it's the ability to add your own, every company seems to have it's own vocabulary of custom emojis that form part of the culture.

You may not think much about the emoji you use to text every day but there are compelling human stories behind them.

I just learn something new from this! I used emoji always but I don't know the story before. Most of the emoji I used from https://www.uihut.com/icon/icon.

I'm going to warm up to emoji a lot after I hear stories from Africa or India (or other area where credit cards are not abundant), embedding their own culture into the standard.

As it is, the commitee accepting emoji is heavily biased towards the West, by having web pages in English only, and by limiting access by requiring a credit card.

As far as I know there is no credit card required.

I mean, the barrier to joining the Unicode Consortium – which decides on the emoji policy for everyone – is biased this way: https://www.unicode.org/consortium/joinform.html

Granted, it's slightly different from the emoji submission procedure, but tightly related.

Biased towards the west?

There's emoji mountain is literally Mount Fuji, a shinkansen emoji, a literal map of Japan emoji (the only country to have one), and like half the food emojis are Japan-specific snacks.

Yes but this is a historical artifact from the Docomo character set.

One could argue that Japan has become very close to the west after the WW2.

Additionally, bias rarely manifests itself in complete erasure, but usually in making something easier, and something else more difficult.

Lumping Japan in with the west (but only when we feel like it) was the defining factor in the rise of fascism in Japan.

Can someone please help with binocular emoji? That is woven in the story of my life here.

There is a different HN story that doesn't accept comments, why? I don't see any there and can't write there. It is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28231153

It's a YC company job posting. They appear on the front page every day, and never allow votes or comments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com