[HN Gopher] Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018-2026
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Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018-2026
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 44 points
Date : 2026-01-27 16:39 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.emojipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.emojipedia.org)
| ashton314 wrote:
| I wonder how hard some folks ant Apple had to work to keep Alan
| Dye away from the Emoji design.
| codethief wrote:
| > 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.
| adzm wrote:
| I'd say it has worked pretty well with a few notable
| exceptions.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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/
| idle_zealot wrote:
| 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.
| contagiousflow wrote:
| 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.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Well the Taiwan flag doesn't appear on mainland china phones, I
| think the phone does fall back to the TW letters.
| xcf_seetan wrote:
| 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.
| graemep wrote:
| 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?
| neogodless wrote:
| Which skin color should all emoji be?
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066.
| ..
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Original bright yellow was a good candidate, since actually
| no one looks like this.
| F3nd0 wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| why not let people just pick which one they want to use
| magguzu wrote:
| 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"
| normie3000 wrote:
| This map doesn't seem accurate.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| (+deg#deg)+( +-+ <- let's see you encode that, unicode.
| jojomodding wrote:
| Unicode seems to encode it just fine
| direwolf20 wrote:
| I just see a flipped table. That means the decoder gave up.
| bobsmooth wrote:
| 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.
| smeej wrote:
| 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.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Still mad that the gun was nerfed.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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.
| epolanski wrote:
| Idk, I don't mind them.
|
| It's not that much of an issue and we largely converged.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Shameless plug, but if you want to see more about emojis. I made
| a museum:
|
| https://emojistime.com/museum
| augusteo wrote:
| 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.
| jorvi wrote:
| 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.
| Oarch wrote:
| The Toss emojis at the end of the article are surprisingly
| artful!
| normie3000 wrote:
| Shame, I was hoping they'd introduced a "hand tossing" emoji.
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(page generated 2026-01-30 23:00 UTC)