Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018-2026 | Hacker News Reader

Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018-2026

blog.emojipedia.org

54 pointssurprisetalk47 comments

I 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.

Idk, I don't mind them.

It's not that much of an issue and we largely converged.

I'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"

I 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.

With 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.

Well the Taiwan flag doesn't appear on mainland china phones, I think the phone does fall back to the TW letters.

Apple 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

As 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.

There 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?

Which skin color should all emoji be?

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066...

Original bright yellow was a good candidate, since actually no one looks like this.

Why 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.

why not let people just pick which one they want to use

I guess they could just support custom colours, but that seems like a needless complication—much like skin tones themselves.

Just use a font with the colours you like?

Why are the Simpsons yellow, yet the black guy in the show is black?

There's no "neutral" rather its just "white without specifying it"

Why should the Simpsons hold any relevance to emoji?

That is your perception. What is neutral is cultural, maybe personal.

I grew up in two multi-cultural places so do not have the same default perceptions.

This map doesn't seem accurate.

Indigenous is a tricky concept in many place. Can you tell me who that map defines as the indigenous people of the following places:

England

Japan

Turkey

Sri Lanka

South Africa

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ <- let's see you encode that, unicode.

Unicode seems to encode it just fine

I just see a flipped table. That means the decoder gave up.

I mean this genuinely, are you on the spectrum? My friends and I use emojis all the time and I've never been confused by what they mean.

Do you ever use them cross-generationally? I had a friend a dozen years my junior stop talking to me because I used a winking face when I wanted to make it clear I was kidding and he thought I was flirting with him. Never mind that we'd been friends for years and there had never, ever been a hint of interest between us. He insisted I should have known that's what it "always" means, never mind that I was using emoticons in AIM when he was in diapers.

I'm not friends with any zoomers but I generally use sticking tongue out when I'm being cheeky.

This wasn't cheeky so much as self-deprecating enough that it was important to clarify I didn't actually mean it seriously. It would've sounded pretty dark otherwise.

This doesn't feel much different than words. There was a whole ordeal at Microsoft when an intern said an event was going to be "lit" and a bunch of older generation folk assumed that meant drugs.

Language changes all the time, emoji are just part of that.

The collection is so large and some images feel like have no purpose of use in casual conversations. Few times I've seen statements saying that emojis can and do help communicating with foreigners when text fails - as these add needed context. But if you do dig around figuring out how to pass thought in little images, you can use translation software instead, which nowadays is really good.

Some 20 years ago a ICQ-like instant messenger in Poland called Gadu-Gadu has become the default way of communication on the Internet for us here. GG had own set of emoticons but only few of really big set were in constant use [1; set for KDE's Koperte but it was same on Windows native client]. I doubt that anything have changed and emoji are being treated in same way: a small set is used and rest is largely skipped.

There was this little thing about GG's emoticon that when you typed "??" and "!!" application would turn these into looped gifs. People were so accustomed to that effect they were doing double punctuation elsewhere on the Internet and even in real life.

[1] - https://store.kde.org/p/1002190/

Still mad that the gun was nerfed.

It'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.

Not much of a difference between replacing a gun emoji with a water gun and find replacing "gun" with "water gun"

I would say that was a very large difference indeed.

Oops, I misunderstood your comment.

Shameless plug, but if you want to see more about emojis. I made a museum:

https://emojistime.com/museum

I can see you forgot most of the text ones from circa 1998. :) :( :p :/ 8) :D XD :* and so on... mostly from IRC times.

> 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.

I'd say it has worked pretty well with a few notable exceptions.

    With 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/

I 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.

Emoji 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

But 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.

The Toss emojis at the end of the article are surprisingly artful!

Shame, I was hoping they'd introduced a "hand tossing" emoji.

I wonder how hard some folks ant Apple had to work to keep Alan Dye away from the Emoji design.

The 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.

The 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.

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