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Openmoji

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239 pointsAnhTho_FR67 comments

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Some pretty delightful (ab)use of ZWJ[0] to come up with unique new "characters":

* nail and gear flag [1]

* united federation of planets flag (star trek) [2]

* HAL 9000 [3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner

[1] https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-1F3F3-FE0F-200D-1F4CC-200...

[2] https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-1F3F3-FE0F-200D-1F7E6-200...

[3] https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-25C9-FE0F-200D-1F534-200D...

Galaxy? When Vulcan salute was RIGHT THERE!

Can I finally have my :dumpster-fire: emoji?

Time to make a Pegasus emoji using racehorse+ZWJ+wing.

I'd love the flag of Aboriginal Australia to be included too! I always think it's really disappointing that it isn't included anywhere, particularly if Star Trek is going to be represented. Any help?

Well, it is open source...

I think the 'any help' acknowledges that while also implying GP doesn't feel up to it.

I was going to suggest that there might be a copyright issue, but it looks like that may have changed last year.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-24/aboriginal-flag-copyr...

>nail and gear flag

Huh. Hello, Tim.

Gone but not forgotten!

These are cool, it would be nice if there were also waving flag versions to match the styles of the leading emoji sets (eg Apple and Google). Most of them use some form of wavy flag:

https://emojipedia.org/flag-european-union#designs

Great idea to spread the work among students! "OpenMoji is an open-source project of the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd by Benedikt Groß, Daniel Utz, 70+ students and external contributors."

An assignment for each student could be to come up with one emoji currently missing from Unicode. The extensions they have so far seem very useful: UI elements, field-specific concepts, regional foods and animals, e.g. https://openmoji.org/library/#group=extras-openmoji%2Ffood-d...

The library reminds me a bit of a page I threw together to browse the EmojiOne set:

https://stime.tech/emoji-explorer/index.html

Give it a minute to load the JS, and then you'll get a dialog for each icon/character you click. My favorite part was using XSLT over the original SVG data to generate black and white "coloring sheets". Most of them turned out pretty decent. E.g., https://stime.tech/emoji-explorer/assets/coloring/emoji-snai...

These are very pretty, I really like the line breaks when an element is added over the face, such as in "face with tears of joy" or "star-struck". But some of them look a little off for me, like the skull or the baby emoji.

If you want to just see the emoji set, I found the listings at Emojipedia [0] to be nice than OpenMoji's page [1], which only shows a few per page.

0: https://emojipedia.org/openmoji

1: https://openmoji.org/library/

The master branch 'dev catalog' seems better in that respect: https://hfg-gmuend.github.io/openmoji/

(That is, AIUI, the 'next' version of the emojis, not that the format of the library/catalog itself is due to change.)

I prefer Noto Emoji: https://emojipedia.org/google

imo the best ones are on Apple, and I'm saying this as an android user which happens to use Signal (which uses the apple emojis)

Microsoft Teams has some of the most consistently designed emoji:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-all-availabl...

Apple’s are good but are not super consistent in terms of style.

Apple's, Noto, and OpenMoji are far more legible to me than Teams. I'll take being able to quickly recognize the emojis over consistency any day.

I _loathe_ the Teams emoji, but then again the entire application is utterly awful. I'd much rather use these openmoji in something like Slack or Matrix.

Their tongue out emoji (which I use quite frequently) looks ridiculous. Pretty much every emoji set has a neutral looking face with the tongue out, indicating a very slight amount of unseriousness. Meanwhile the Teams one has big anime-esque smiling eyes that looks straight up goofy.

Also their thumbs up has such a fat hand you can barely tell it's a hand or where the fingers are.

But yes, far from the biggest issues with this stupid app.

I had to zoom in to see there was a tongue. It looks like an open mouth. What a terrible design.

I will die on the hill that the blobs were the best emoji and Google should have never gotten rid of them.

They were very cute!

Here's a page with more information for anyone curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blob_emoji

If they didn't need them, kind of wish they had been released in a way that'd allow for making an online collection that can be used for apps/websites. Right now all I could find were some Discord servers that'd let you use them on that particular platform or something like that.

They are very popular on the Fediverse.

They're in the Emoji Kitchen (Gboard on Android)! Try combining the magic wand with any smiley: https://emojikitchen.dev/

I agree. FWIW, they've returned (somewhat) in the black and white version of noto emojis

The only important function of emojis should be to display the same idea or emotion to the viewer as was intended by the person who sent it. We're in a much better state now with all the emoji sets slowly converging to look the same, compared to years ago when Samsung's grimace emoji looked constipated[1], or their eye roll emoji looked like a cute smile while everyone else's was clearly a sarcastic eye roll[2], causing many a miscommunication.

The blobs were nice in a vacuum, but in most usages they weren't an accurate reflection of the intent of either the person sending them, or what the person seeing them was supposed to see from the sender. They made the right move switching away.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/6bk8i1/samsun...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/samsung/comments/7gm5f6/come_on_guy...

Beyond its value as an art project (which this project seems to be), I’ve never understood the desire — let alone need — for custom emoji drawings for the official Unicode emojis. The OS already support these. You’re just reinventing the wheel.

It’s not licensing, otherwise the very font you’re looking at is illegal.

If it for some he idea that some novel emoji isn’t supported until someone updates; well, that’s like what? A couple of weeks every four years? Even then, that doesn’t explain why the basic smiley gets revamped, that’s over a decade old.

Consistency? Please. Your app is already inconsistent across platforms due to platform conventions, and you’ve made your app inconsistent with every other app.

In the end me, we’re left with one reason. Perhaps the most common reason why anything is done in big tech (and let’s be honest, that’s who the little people take their cues from), vanity.

Apple is the canonical design. Sure, maybe some OS needs a font, but there’s literally no reason X, or Facebook, or Samsung need their own font.

Any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.

Following your argument we also just need one font covering all Unicode in general.

I am happy that there is variants to choose from and that apparently the designs also influence each other.

Also licensing, which you dismissed handwavingly, is an issue because e.g. Apple doesn’t distribute their emoji for other platforms, do they? Easily more than half of devices on the web are not Apple devices. At least 70% as per https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Nice to see this posted on HN! A while back ago I used them for the design of a site a built https://cmdchallenge.com/ which gives it a nice feel of achievement badges without using standard emoji characters that may look different depending on the client.

These emojis grew on me after a while. I still think Twitter's open source emojis look better, but this is a really cool project that shows off more creativity.

Oh wow. I really love the drawn style of those!

There is a new build system for fonts since the last release that has a wider range of color font types. I found the COLRv0 format fixed some issues I was having. The new formats aren't in the 14.0 release. I much prefer the 2D style of OpenMoji to 3D emoji fonts.

Why is open-source ugly in general?

looks like an opensource icon framework to me

Yeah, I came here to ask if the professionals in this field draw a clear distinction between icons and emojis. I did a quick search in there for names of icons for which in my little frontend projects I use like Bootstrap Icons, and the results seemed fine. So, are icons and emojis really all the same things? Because, if so, Openmoji seems to offer quite a bit more elements to pick from.

Sure, most emojis can be useful as icons and vice versa.

Technically, both can be available as SVG files and as Unicode characters in a font.

Not sure if there's a consensus on the definitions, personally I use word "icon" to describe small graphics that serves functional purpose in GUI, and word "emoji" to describe small graphics that expresses one's personal emotion.

They are all pictograms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictogram Emojis are sometimes ideograms https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideogram

These are great. I wanted a few icons of food things and everything I wanted is here.

I was procrastinating on HN putting off this task, these emoji have bounced me back into doing, not procrastinating.

Thanks to whomever posted this.

I whish they were better looking, I would have updated my website https://www.emojilo.com

Just looking at the source, the SVGs can be made smaller. Would be good to have a minified set.

I really like this project, and it's fun to see that they are adding their own extra emojis as well.

Menu in Library does not work in Safari.

I thought emojis definition is that it's supported by major browsers/phones/etc.

Interesting to see that this project has the same license as Twemoji.

What's interesting about it? It's just CC-BY SA.

Shameless self promotion:

While I use Emojipedia to search for emoji (and view previous versions, which is really great), they don't link to the SVGs, so...

[Awesome Emoji](https://github.com/VectorLogoZone/awesome-emoji) with links to the SVGs for any emoji sets that I could find. Contributions welcome!

> Animals with a big body are illustrated from the side.

Proceed to illustrate the rabbit from the side, but the lion from the front. How big is this rabbit??

As big as the Cave of Caerbannog?

Objectively the need to attribute limits the usefulness of an asset like this at scale or even, when not at scale, by just adding complexity to ‘do things right’. I’m not saying that the limitation is not worth it. But I wonder if creators factor this in when choosing a license. If you want to make an artefact that reaches a huge scale, become a standard, etc. mandatory attribution hinders adoption. If it is about visibility (and ego) it makes sense. If it is about profit by limiting commercial use, maybe but why not just make it paid for and profit from all uses.

Why is there U+E183 "Trump"[1] that is just a caricature of Trump?

Seems a little bit daft to add any kind of political bias?

I would expect extensions to Unicode like that to be pretty universal, and to not include specific current political figures. Same with Great Thunberg[2] -- I just dont see why these characters are in any way revelant enough. Do we add Putin? Do we add Einstein? Do we add Hitler? Do we add all the Caesars? How about emperor of the holy roman empire? Oppenheimer? Ghandi?

There should certainly be a line. Last thing that needs to be more political are emojis.

[1]: https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-E183/

[2]: https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-E188/

U+E000 through U+F8FF is "private use area": https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UE000.pdf . Those characters were not "added to Unicode", but every font is free to add whatever they want there. Those are obviously not interoperable, that is, other font designers can place entirely different characters there.

Of course, yes, but for an "OpenMoji" project I would have expected a bit more professionalism.

... for a project done by a bunch of volunteers and young students likely having fun making little graphics without compensation, and with a name that involves a casual shortening of the key term ..... you expected "professionalism"

young students... and random volunteers... who aren't getting paid...

do you _really_ think that an expectation of "professionalism" is one that lines up well with the reality of the project?

I was going to share and use this, yes, but this smells of the kind of quirkiness I dont care for. Thats all.

Fortunately, you can just ignore the icons you don't want to use — namely, all the private ones.

Also, not sure why you quoted me as saying "added to Unicode", I specifically worded it as "extensions to Unicode"?

Another commenter pointed out at least 70 students contributed to this font as part of an assignment. I'm guessing that being allowed to add their own emoji for fun in the private use area was part of the deal. Small price to pay for motivating them if you ask me.

I think I would prefer if emojis of people used character sequences like flags do, rather than single characters in the PUA. No idea what should be done with name conflicts.

Here's another political bias: https://openmoji.org/library/emoji-1F52B/

Mixed signals, hah. The character is - incorrectly, according to UCD, where it's still "pistol" - called "water pistol" (name probably coming either from Emojipedia or CLDR) but supposedly features a firearm.

notice Greta’s innocent smile lol

Related in name only. Open emoji battler https://game.open-emoji-battler.community/

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