Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
blog.google
blog.google
This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B slider vs the old versions. Overall the new design looks like a fairly tasteful compromise between Google's previous flat-shaded vector emoji and the hybrid 2d+3d Apple emoji, with the benefits (easier to rerender with higher-resolution, animations, tweaked lighting, etc.) that you'd get from a fully-3D pipeline. So I like the new set of emoji, just not this particular blog.google.com article.
What's the overlap of people excited about new emoji and also read blog.google? OTOH, I guess they didn't ask to be posted to HN. :shrug:
I think it's a bit annoying that for some emoji, they still change the content and not just the style.
It's not as bad as the "gun/watergun controversy", but I think especially that cat emoji could lead to messages being interpreted differently, depending which version of the emoji you see.
The corporate link in the OP was gushing endlessly about the sophisticated ways to communicate emotions that are ostensibly enabled by emoji, so shouldn't then companies at least make sure the emojis consistently show the same thing?
I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms. There are still significant differences between Android and iOS, for example. They recognize how subtle emoji interpretation is, so the only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels.
You can't really do this. Or, rather, it's already been done, but people choose not to do this.
Emoji are just unicode characters. How they're displayed depends on the font used. Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
The one announced here is open source, for instance, but there's no way Apple is going to adopt it as the system default.
"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user. We understand users might prefer the current designs, and we are proud of the work our team has done, but we believe that consistent communication is more important, and individual users can always enable the override to get the old look back."
> Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.
Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.
> Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.
Well by "everyone" I meant platform companies, app makers, and website designers. There's literally no way you'll get them to agree on a font choice.
> "We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".
First you'd have to get Apple to license their emoji font, presumably open source and freely available if you truly want it to be standardized across platforms. Have they ever open sourced a font? Or get Apple to agree to use someone else's font as the system default. Have they ever done that?
Second, if you forbid app developers from choosing an emoji font, the Facebooks of the world are just going to work around you by stripping out the emoji and manually inserting theirs in. Somewhat ironically, by ignoring the platform emoji font, which can lead to some jarring text rendering if you're used to the system font, apps like Facebook are fulfilling your dream of standardized unicode across platforms...but of course, only for users of their apps.
Third, I think you really underestimate the fundamental disagreements here. The Unicode Technical Committee has a working group to try to improve unicode interoperability, and victories are on the level of getting vendors to agree if the standard for the Lotus emoji should mention that it shouldn't include a lillypad (they decided no[1]). They're working on this, but it's never going to be what you want.
In any case, I understand what you're saying and I wasn't dismissing the fact that the precise emoji design can influence why you used that emoji at all, which gets lost in the translation to another emoji font.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25230-esr-report-utc185.pdf
interesting how people still provide tho https://github.com/bradleyhodges/SFWindows
This is a step in that direction. The entire industry has been consolidating around Apple's look. Take a look at the old Google, Samsung and Microsoft versions of Woman dancer for a trip https://emojipedia.org/woman-dancing#designs
Since switching to iPhone recently, I've been realizing that iMessage users are living in another world, and beginning to understand their emoji choices more. I assumed the double exclamation emoji was just some trend, but it turned out to be one of the preselected emoji for iMessage and I was just oblivious since I didn't use that software. Other notes include the "haha" emoji instead of the "tears of joy" and pink hearts instead of red.
There's no way to standardize this. People communicate in different ways. The whole point of emoji is to be creative. If there's one singular "correct" way to use an emoji then creativity is dead.
I think this is the funniest sentence I've ever read on Hackernews.
What are we doing with our lives?
Seems like they're trying to tease excitement for new emoji in the next Android release (there was also an earlier linkless post in May[1]), so I'm assuming they don't want anyone scooping them and will push to the Noto repo on or after the day of release.
Seems like the post really should at least have used a future tense for "handing over raw .OBJ files to the community".
[1] https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...
According to who, a sample size of you?
I don't love their current emojis. The older, flat "blob" style was much better, and if I had my druthers we'd be getting a 3D remaster of those.
> stop breaking our pattern recognition
OS updates will come all the same, it's your job to select and enforce a style that you prefer. If not, your emojis will be like system fonts; outside of your control, changed at the whims of your OEM. And we all know that Apple and Google love breaking your muscle memory.
and are copied and pasted from emojicopy.com and getemoji.com respectively. They appear differently on each website, and yet identical here when copied and pasted. It is not possible for me (or anyone at this time) to comment with two different graphical representations of the same emoji in a comment on this site.
edit: apparently HN is a no fun zone and doesn't allow emojis, but give it a shot and you'll see that they change when you paste them in a new page.
Take the cat from the 9to5 link in the other comments. If I like using the smirking cat, for instance, to indicate potentially devious behavior, I will no longer have that option because they are turning it in to a smiling cat.
It would be possible in editting software, of course, just like fonts, but in messaging (the original and arguable core use of emoji) not so much.
So many of the newer code points are ZWJ patterns modifying existing emoji. If you already rigged the 3D shark emoji, when unicode decides that :shark: + ZWJ + :family of 3: has to resolve to :horrific shark attack involving a family of 3:, at least that's not too hard.
What part of this is AI? What part of that couldn’t have been done without it? Do they just mean they vibecoded it?
They've correctly identified that a lot of emoji use is figurative, but then are trying to contribute to that by making them 3D. Here is a symbol you use meaningfully, we made it different to help.
It's just so wrong-headed, like responding to the news of someone's beloved cat dying by saying they should just get another. A total failure of understanding the thing they are pontificating about.
There's so much artistry and time & effort put into these, and they end up feeling l ike a yellow smudge behind a crack on a dim screen in my life.
I don't think the data at https://www.emojitracker.com/ is as valid or as frequently updated.
People using smiling and laughing emoji were not literally smiling and laughing no more than the people writing LOL.
>We’re handing over raw .OBJ files to the community so they can use them to build immersive VR worlds, indie apps or weird memes.
Where?
Not sure why ROFL is relevant, a typical emoji user is likely unfamiliar with internet slang.
"We don't just "laugh" anymore. We collapse, or internally scream".
"They need a pulse and a soul — not the cold precision of industrial CAD models"
It's everywhere now and no one seems to notice. Sometimes I feel like the guy in They Live (1988) with the glasses.
I just love the "efety Updates" and Android 1.
I have no idea what "randoseru" means, or what kind of backpack it is. Looking it up, it seems to be a design that carries special meaning in Japan, and not really anywhere else. While other countries _may_ have similar designs, it's not something special to them.
Even if the emoji looked like a ranoseru backpack, it wouldn't mean anything to most people. If anything, the front pocket is more likely to be associated with a backpack used for school.
There was an article shared here by emojipedia that showed, besides the obvious gun emoji turning into a toy gun and then back into a gun, subtle differences between designs changing the MEANING of a message on the internet.
Can you imagine if you write a word like "imagine" that changes meaning depending on what font the user has installed? It's probably a nightmare for preservation as well. You can't record the text, you have to record a screenshot of the emoji because in 50 years who knows what it's going to look like!
> The way we use emoji has changed. In the early days, we were literal: You sent a nail polish emoji () because you were, in fact, getting your nails polished.
The early days of emojis used unpaired parentheses, colons, and semicolons. It's like claiming int the early days of Apple the company released macOS 10.
rofl