Designing emoji for the way we communicate today(blog.google) |
Designing emoji for the way we communicate today(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 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.
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.
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...
I don't think the data at https://www.emojitracker.com/ is as valid or as frequently updated.
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.
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?
I just love the "efety Updates" and Android 1.
rofl
> 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.
But there's no emoji for things you do need, like pouting face (you're forced to use enraged face which is too strong).
> 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
Not sure why ROFL is relevant, a typical emoji user is likely unfamiliar with internet slang.