An interview with an Apple emoji designer | Hacker News Reader

An interview with an Apple emoji designer

shadycharacters.co.uk

124 pointsnate78 comments

Off topic: Perhaps it's just me, but I have a pet peeve about emojis in anything formal. Even before LLMs, I instinctively took a repo less seriously when README.md had emojis in every section. And now LLMs have popularized that style, it's the first signal for me to vibe-detect AI repos.

I do use emojis. I love them, actually, but only in message apps.

Or SSID’s

Not just you!

Emoji are fun to use because they make written communication more human… corporations or LLMs using them just comes off as insincere.

I don't like to see them anywhere. They were cool for a while back in version 1.0 when there were a few that everyone knew and used in creative ways, before Apple* decided to make so many that you need a search bar. It's kinda like Pokémon. At this point I only get them in text messages from old people.

* yeah I know technically the Unicode Consortium, but Apple pushed it hard

Emoji (and their predecessor, emoticons) are IMO the greatest new feature for written language that has happened in generations. Eschewing them is certainly a choice you can make, but I personally think it's a poor one.

Authors can now bundle emotional sentiment in text communication. Not being able to do this in the past was usually just an annoyance but could occasionally turn out to be extremely problematic. Countless miscommunications have occurred due to recipients not correctly interpreting an author's tone, and we now have a tool that can help reduce or potentially eliminate those misunderstandings. It's early days, so we're still seeing teething issues: different emoji sets conveying subtly different cues and evolving social norms around their use. But they have incredible potential.

And yet you are here, a site completely devoid of emoji.

Because the social norms of this place currently discourage it.

I also don’t use contractions in formal writing settings. Does that make them bad?

I think the site owner actively filters them out and has been doing so ever since you joined this site in 2011.

But no matter the reason for the complete lack of emoji, the fact that you like this site enough to participate here is evidence that emoji don't actually improve public discussion as much as you think they would.

There are many many sites on which you could have chosen to participate where emoji are common and can be used freely.

You choose to participate here instead of having face-to-face conversations. Does that mean that face-to-face discussions aren't useful? I walk on sidewalks where cars are prohibited. Does that mean that cars aren't useful? I drive on highways where pedestrians are prohibited. Does that mean walking isn't useful?

Whatever point you're trying to make, this is an extremely ineffective argument for it. You’re in “checkmate, atheists” territory here.

> You choose to participate here instead of having face-to-face conversations.

Nothing about the comment you are replying to implies an abstinence from face-to-face conversations, and the suggestion is not very plausible.

It seems you understand my point.

I take your point, as demonstrated here, that even straightforward written language can be completely misunderstood, and that emoji might help alleviate that, though how they could help in the particular case here is not clear to me.

GGP asserted that if I participate here, where emoji are forbidden, that implies they aren’t as useful as I think they are.

I provide equally ridiculous examples of how engagement in a venue that restricts things has no bearing on whether or not those things are generally useful. It simply means that society has agreed those things aren’t appropriate in every context.

Isn't there a comic about this kind of argument? I don't think emojis add anything, but lack of emojis on HN doesn't say anything about that, other than the creator probably doesn't like them either.

We already had that ;)

Again emoji 1.0 was good. You can convey what you need with a small subset of that even. But even if modern computers were limited to emoji 1.0, I suspect they'd have been equally spammed to the point of losing meaning anyway.

However, the lack of standardization between platforms causes its own miscommunication. Some of the icons between Apple and Google can be interpreted in significantly different ways.

There is also the pistol[0] which depending on the platform is a water gun or revolver.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji

Well Apple emojis are de facto standard, the rest follow. Even the stupid water gun.

I explicitly called out different emoji sets conveying subtly different meanings.

If only Keats or Plath had emoji!

People surely thought a similar sentiment about spaces between words and punctuation.

Anyone claiming those developments enabled the expression of something previously inexpressible would have been mistaken.

You know, I would actually use little Pokemon sprite emojis, unlike the real thing.

I do not use emoji and I do not have (and do not want) colourful emoji on my computer (emoji as ordinary text characters would be acceptable for the purpose of displaying texts that have emoji, but I don't really need to that much, even if the texts have them, so I can do without that, too). The reason does not have to do with AI; I think that things can rarely be explained better with emoji, and is usually better to explain by text, and sometimes also diagrams will help (for computer programs, having good documentation is very helpful). (I also don't like Unicode.)

> We mapped almost 1:1 to SoftBank’s set, though Apple chose to omit a few of the more risqué ones.

Which are these risqué emojis mentioned here? I don't think I have ever seen any that are even slightly graphic, which is probably why all the emoji slang conventions have spread like fire (Aubergine, Peach, etc.)

long eggplant and a smaller Pinching Hand emoji were probably the first to go

That's a good question. Comparing the Softbank emoji from June 2008 [0] and the initial batch of Apple emoji that shipping in iPhone OS 2.2 (Nov 2008) [1], it doesn't look like there are any missing at all, it's a perfect 1:1 mapping.

0: https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2008

1: https://emojipedia.org/apple/iphone-os-2.2

Maybe edit rather than omit? Apple changed the people kissing with actual lip contact, the 1910s-looking cancan dancers, and the stink lines on the poop.

Its kinda odd how a lot of the major tech companies have self censored emojis like they are some savior of the planet for doing so.

For example the gun emoji by turning it into a water pistol instead of a real looking firearm handgun lol.

WOW THEY SURE CAUSED COUNTLESS LIVES TO BE SAVED W THAT ONE SINGLE MOVE!

It's virtue signaling - nonsense from the same people who unironically say things like "lived experience" and "emotional labor." It shows they're part of a particular group, so they're Good, and if you're not, you're Bad.

I disagree - I think it might be more about predictable-hassle-avoidance.

The media landscape is all about creating sensation, trying to find an edge from something a politician said or a corporation did to generate a headline and some clicks. And as we know, companies like Apple are heavily scrutinised because they’re even better at driving clicks.

So I think Apple is incentivised to look for things which in a reasonable world wouldn’t even register, but which might cause some minor sensation they’d have to deal with, and snuff out that risk beforehand.

Stickers are for you. Plenty of uncensored content and as soon as you send one from one of your packs, the recipient can start using them anywhere as well.

https://signalstickers.org/

It is free PR so corporations lap that kind of thing up.

I was going to say that the love hotel emoji was the only one I could think of, but in the process of trying to find the emojipedia link (https://emojipedia.org/love-hotel) I found a Reddit thread that leads to a now-defunct blog post:

12 years ago - Apple removes beer, wine, love hotel, and other emojis from insertion palette in Messages app https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2qqaya/apple_removes...

The blog it links to is dead, so here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20150312182931/http://blog.getem...

There is still no walnut emoji. Blonde-haired, black-skinned pregnant man? Yes. Walnut? No.

Be the petty, small change you wish to see in the world: https://joypixels.com/blog/how-to-submit-an-emoji-to-unicode

Gotta love websites that hijack basic browser functions, in this case forcing smooth scroll on.

Seems to be some sort of design agency or similar, it's basically internet-law at this point that those always fuck with the scroll movements of your browser, for some reason.

Yeah I felt that and left so fast, forget that

Gotta love browsers that let websites hijack basic browser functions.

I will be. Thanks.

By the way, Walnut Creek is less than 100 miles from Cupertino.

I love walnuts.

I'll bet you could find a place named after most any nut within 100 miles of Cupertino.

Also no thief emoji or pirate emoji. Can someone enlighten me why we don't have it?

Simply because nobody has successfully pitched the Unicode group to add one.

Anyone can pitch new emoji, they just have to go through the fairly easy but strict formal process.

Alex Schmidt, a humor writer (formerly of Cracked and others) did this process for the bison emoji. I enjoyed his “miniseries” about it: https://www.bisonemojipodcast.com/

does the reverse notebooklm exist yet that turns podcasts into longform journalism?

Not that I know of. And I generally prefer written pieces to podcasts :).

The show notes for episode 2 have good references (no fun commentary though): https://www.bisonemojipodcast.com/show-notes

What’s next, a cowboy emoji? A ninja emoji? But seriously, as much as I like emojis, I kind of feel like they should stick to emotions. Maybe other intangible things. They’re hard to convey verbally (and succinctly), simple concrete nouns are good for a bit of fun and for UI icons, but really not very useful if we’re being honest. Unless you’re texting with a lizard, or my lazy elementary-school niece who shouldn’t really have a phone anyway…

Or you're texting with people whose native language uses a logographic system.

If we add 26 more emojis, one for each letter, we could use them to spell out all sorts of words - emotions, objects, anything!

26 emojis? You could do the entire bestiary from the original Rogue with that!

There are really 26 emoji letters that are used for spelling country codes in the flags, like https://emojipedia.org/regional-indicator-symbol-letter-u

I was looking for a pirate emoji like 5 minutes ago. I'm sure it's not the first time but I'm super surprised that still isn't in there. Seems so obvious.

Well there's a pirate flag

still no Guillotine Emoji either, although not for a lack of trying.

https://www.carrozo.com/guillotine-emoji

I love the pregnant man emoji, I use it all the time after a big meal

No more gun emoji. Humanity could not be trusted with the cartoon revolver emoji. Take your squirtgun, citizen.

We got the mpreg emoji instead of a chainsaw, which makes me feel like we need an emoji lobbying group for things like sex, drugs, sawed-off shotguns and jury nullification.

Been waiting for seahorse myself.

If the author is reading this, the hyperlink to the book in the first paragraph is broken. Looks like it's attempting to direct you to an absolute url that was meant to be relative.

    <a href="https://books/face-with-tears-of-joy">

In case anyone is actually interested in the emoji:

https://emojipedia.org/apple

More specifically, it was this set: https://emojipedia.org/apple/iphone-os-2.2

Interesting tidbit:

> Emoji support required iPhone OS 2.2 and a SoftBank SIM card.

To be honest, the images look like things I've seen a hundred times over in comic books and not much more original than GenAI.

is that not sorta the point? i don't get the genai reference

not much more original than GenAI.

What exactly do you think the "GenAI" trained on?

These are very nostalgic. The way Apple's emoji look has subtly changed since then.

So cool to get the background story on this. I remember adding the Japanese keyboard here in the US just so I could get access to emojis.

Modifying the Universal: a seminal piece on emoji’s and possibly why/how from a humanities perspective: https://youtu.be/ZP2bQ_4Q7DY?si=TIl4Zhs2X2ZgBJfY

I just finished Keith Houston's previous book _Empire of the Sum_, a history of calculators, I'll be reading this next.

Are the emojis on Apple (macOS, iOS etc) vector graphics these days?

They are not. They are perhaps higher resolution than they once were, but still raster:

https://logandark.net/files/328S6690-9Q368809-16843Q53-RR2SN...

> and then through to Steve Jobs for final approval

I miss Steve Jobs

Why does that site feel like I am reading typed text on paper?

Did you print it out?

LOL

It's a combination of the layout, the typeface (https://monokrom.no/fonts/satyr), and the thoughtful typography.

Serif font?

The letters are super fuzzy (a ton of anti-aliasing, even on the bottoms of the letters where it's not needed)

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