are
everything.
And they’re just getting started. We
talked to Jennifer Daniel, the of Unicode Consortium's Emoji Subcommittee, about
the future of language, the appeal of the
, and how emoji can be more like fonts.
What does that mean for the future of emoji as a form?
I would say that I have a distinct point of view on where I have seen emoji come from, where they are today, and where I'd like to see them go — which is to embrace the font aspect of it. I think that they are fonts, so they should behave like a font. They don't currently. You can't change their color, you can't change their size, you can't even change their styling. You're locked into one. I think has set false expectations around what they can and should be able to do.
That's why the Noto emoji is part of that vision, if you will, is saying, okay, here's an emoji font that does behave like what you would expect from a font. You can put it bold, you can put it light, you can change its color, you can change its size. You can embed it on your website. I'd really love to see people rely on Unicode less and say, “Okay, Unicode has provided a foundation. What can I do with that foundation?”
In other words, stop waiting to be given more creations, and start getting creative with what’s there. Is that sort of what your Emoji Kitchen project is about?
Emoji Kitchen, for those who aren’t familiar, allows you to input an emoji like turtle and an emoji like hot dog, and then it generates a sticker, a sticker that looks like a turtle dressed up like a hot dog. (Similarly, Apple has Memoji.) None of those characters are in your emoji palette, they're made up. They're evocative of their emoji fonts.
I think those are really important because they say, “Okay, we have a shared understanding of what these glyphs are, but we can do more with them.” You see that already with how people compose emojis together. These are all things that are not standardized by the Consortium, but people are using the characters that they've added to the universal character sheet. To me, the more we can create that flexibility, the more we're going to see. Who knows what we'll see from that?
Emoji by the numbers...
Jeffrey Kurtz
Design by
Rob Walker
Words by
As ubiquitous as emoji have become, most of us give them only fleeting thought — a quick decision whether to respond with tears of joy, a thinking face, or that old standby, smiling poop. Hardly anybody thinks about where these little glyphs come from or who decides which ones end up on your phone.
But Jennifer Daniel does. She thinks about it a lot. An illustrator, designer, and former New York Times art director, Daniel is now the Chair of Unicode Consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee and works on Google’s “Expressions” team, which among other things oversees the design of emoji on Android. She’s also created more than 30 emoji, including Mx. Claus, and publishes an occasional newsletter, Did Somebody Say Emoji?
In short, there’s no better person to talk to about this evolving form of visual communication. Our two conversations over Zoom have been condensed and edited here.
They want to hear your ideas.
It’s been 25 years or so since an initial set of 90 emoji. Now there are thousands and there's an open call for new emoji.
We're kind of entering the third phase, which is like the saturation point. We're almost at 4,000. It's 3,663. At the point where the Consortium was no longer taking existing systems and digitizing them, then that's how you end up with practically a junk drawer. Because once you add an emoji, it's never removed. There's no “let's see what happens.” The whole premise of the universal character set is that it's forever. Emoji are part of that set, so emojis are forever.
What makes an emoji successful, or maybe I should just say popular?
Tears of joy is the most popular emoji. One out of 10 emoji shared is tears of joy. There's a lot of reasons, but it does it all. It tells you that I'm not mad, I'm joking, that I'm just chilling, that we got the vibes, that I'm literally laughing. I'm only laughing on the inside. There's lots of ways to laugh. We've got belly laughs and witches' cackles. It's just the idea of laughter.
The other popular emoji is heart, which is also an abstract concept. It's not really your heart. It's just you can use it when you're sad, or your friend is telling you something upsetting and you're offering sympathy. You can use it in a lustful way. You can use it in a loving way. You can use it for your mother. You can use it in any number of ways. It's very broad and universal, and globally relevant. We’re pretty basic. Most of us really just use the same few emoji over and over again. There's a lot that people don't use.
I know the feeling of scrolling through the choices and it can seem a bit overwhelming...
Yes, that scrolling experience really worked when there were 700 emoji. That probably needs to be revisited. I think depending on who you talk to, you'll find people who are like, “Oh, I try to make an effort to use emoji that I've never used before.” Or other people are like, “I wish I could delete emoji.” Or “I wish my keyboard told me, ‘Congrats, you've never used that emoji,’” which is a real completionist viewpoint on emoji. Other folks are just like, “I don't need all these emojis. Just give me the few that I want.” Then there's other folks that are like, “I don't have enough. I want this one and that one and this one.”
Do you see emoji as a language, or as an adjunct to language or as post-language?
I think emoji have demonstrated that they are gestures, in some manner. I can use a physical gesture to emphasize the words I'm using, and emoji do the same thing. You can say words and then the emoji say what words aren't saying — or they emphasize the important parts of what the words are saying, or they indicate some subversion of what the words are saying. It can operate alongside all the languages. There are primal human expressions that are represented in emoji form; we all smile. To me it feels foundational for language in the same way that punctuation is.
Is there an element of emoji being a secret language, like some variation of Pig Latin?
Yes, that's part of it, but it’s more like slang. You add garbage pail plus fire emoji for dumpster fire. Emoji are able to be re-appropriated over and over again, rather than maybe inventing a new word. The speed of language online is much, much faster than the speed of more formal written communication.
Do you have emoji-using heroes? Who are the poets
of emoji?
Well, I love this question because I've never thought about that. But I really relish hearing from just random people on how they use emoji. I had a friend who's a designer, who'd text his wife elephant emoji, shoe emoji. When you mouth the words, “elephant shoe,” it looks like “I love you.” It's beautiful. How can you not love that?
That is beautiful.
You could just use a heart, fine, but there's something about creating a language that the rest of the world doesn't need to understand. Increasingly, as our vocabularies get a little bit more confident with how to use emoji and a bit more playful, people are putting them together. When they put them together, they mean something new. My friend Julia uses cartwheel emoji and black hole next to it to indicate a nervous breakdown.
We think of emoji as a brand-new form of visual communication, but you’ve pointed out that it connects to older forms, too, right?
A lot of the work I'm trying to do is taking common visuals that are found in literature, comics, and pop culture and then scaling them. That's how we got melting face, that's how we got face exhaling, that's how we got dotted line face. These are all common visual markings.
We've all seen Charlie Brown exhale that puff of smoke. We've all seen someone turn invisible in a Marvel comic. We've all seen characters melt into a puddle in comic strips, in all kinds of graphic novels.
It's taking things we've all observed before and putting them in a new context. It's a lot of looking and observing. It's talking with experts, figuring out where the patterns are, what has been well-established. [We try to] make a distinction between memes — what’s hot this year versus what's been around for hundreds of years. We're all familiar with the idea of shedding a tear of happiness. It's cited in religious scripture, it's cited in Homer's Odyssey.
We had no smile with tears. You take that, you get the evidence that this is something that we experience and have experienced for a very long time. That this is the understood emblem for it.
“You’re not JK. You’re LOL. You’re not LOL. You’re LMAO. You’re not LMAO, you’re keyboard smash. You’re not keyboard smash, you’re ...”
I've seen you write recently about Noto. My understanding is that it's a more simplified emoji variation in black-and-white. Are emojis getting too realistic/complicated/rococo?
These are the questions that I definitely mull over. People use them in different ways. The reason emoji remain relevant and popular is because ultimately they provide some function and meaningfulness in our day-to-day conversations. If they didn't, we wouldn't see them everywhere.
What makes them useful is when you can use them in different ways. It's not specifically “this drink.” It's just the idea of the drink. It's not specific. A dog is a dog. It's just a dog. Now that there are all these other visual ephemera that exist in the world, those can be super-specific. We've got photos and videos and any number of ways to say, “this specific dog.”
As emoji have proliferated, have we changed the way we use them? Do individual emoji go out of fashion?
There was a moment where everyone was like, oh, no one uses tears of joy. No, we do.
But there is this desire to escalate showing how you feel online because you're trying to compensate when you're not face-to-face. You're not JK. You're LOL. You're not LOL. You're LMAO. You're not LMAO, you're keyboard smash. You're not keyboard smash, you're tears of joy. You're not tears of joy, you're skull. All of those mean the same thing. They're all markers of empathy. When you've used one so much, then in order to indicate that this is more special than the last time, you have to put a new spin on it.
“It’s possible there’s still a bunch of fuddy-duds who think emoji diminish our communication, but over 95% of the world’s online population use them.”
You're a smart, talented person with lots of career options. Why emoji?
I think I got the best job in the world, so it's hard to say “why emoji?” because it's a good place to be. For so long, drawing and writing were separate systems of communicating. Now, in the digital space, it's just a blank canvas, where we’ve started to blend again. The fact that I found myself in emoji feels like an inevitability. Where else am I going to be right now?
Sure, but a certain kind of person could look at your career and say: “Seriously? This seems like such a silly thing to be paying attention to.”
I do think that there was a very prescriptive gatekeeping of how writing was supposed to operate, like, “Emoji are ruining language.” And it's possible there's still a bunch of fuddy-duds who think emoji diminish our communication, but over 95% of the world's online population use emoji. There's now a whole field of academics that study emoji.
Think you can come up with a emoji that’s universal and useful enough to be added to the Unicode’s roster? Then give it a shot. Daniel explains the criteria for how new emoji are judged: “Is it being added for compatibility? Is it being added and has multiple uses? Can it be used alongside other emoji to mean something new that isn't already represented? Can people tell what it is? If they can't tell what it is in emoji sizes, it probably shouldn't be an emoji.” Click right find out more.
numbers According to Unicode data
1 out of 10 emoji used
is tears of joy.
Fire is the most popular Animal & Nature emoji.
10 billion emoji are sent daily.
Birthday cake
is the most popular Food
& Drink emoji.
Flag is the least used category.
95% of internet users have
sent an emoji at some point.
There are currently
3,663 emoji.
“We’re all familiar with shedding a tear of happiness. It’s cited in religious scripture and in Homer’s Odyssey. Yet we had no smile with tears. Now this is the understood emblem for it.”
are
every-thing.
<< Scroll for more >>
Do you have emoji-using heroes? Who are the poets of emoji?
Well, I love this question because I've never thought about that. But I really relish hearing from just random people on how they use emoji. I had a friend who's a designer, who'd text his wife elephant emoji, shoe emoji. When you mouth the words, “elephant shoe,” it looks like “I love you.” It's beautiful. How can you not love that?
That is beautiful.
You could just use a heart, fine, but there's something about creating a language that the rest of the world doesn't need to understand. Increasingly, as our vocabularies get a little bit more confident with how to use emoji and a bit more playful, people are putting them together. When they put them together, they mean something new. My friend Julia uses cartwheel emoji and black hole next to it to indicate a nervous breakdown.
We think of emoji as a brand-new form of visual communication, but you’ve pointed out that it connects to older forms, too, right?
A lot of the work I'm trying to do is taking common visuals that are found in literature, comics, and pop culture and then scaling them. That's how we got melting face, that's how we got face exhaling, that's how we got dotted line face. These are all common visual markings.
We've all seen Charlie Brown exhale that puff of smoke. We've all seen someone turn invisible in a Marvel comic. We've all seen characters melt into a puddle in comic strips, in all kinds of graphic novels.
It's taking things we've all observed before and putting them in a new context. It's a lot of looking and observing. It's talking with experts, figuring out where the patterns are, what has been well-established. [We try to] make a distinction between memes — what’s hot this year versus what's been around for hundreds of years. We're all familiar with the idea of shedding a tear of happiness. It's cited in religious scripture, it's cited in Homer's Odyssey. We had no smile with tears. You take that, you get the evidence that this is something that we experience and have experienced for a very long time. That this is the understood emblem for it.
What does that mean for the future of emoji as a form?
I would say that I have a distinct point of view on where I have seen emoji come from, where they are today, and where I'd like to see them go — which is to embrace the font aspect of it. I think that they are fonts, so they should behave like a font. They don't currently. You can't change their color, you can't change their size, you can't even change their styling. You're locked into one. I think has set false expectations around what they can and should be able to do.
That's why the Noto emoji is part of that vision, if you will, is saying, okay, here's an emoji font that does behave like what you would expect from a font. You can put it bold, you can put it light, you can change its color, you can change its size. You can embed it on your website. I'd really love to see people rely on Unicode less and say, “Okay, Unicode has provided a foundation. What can I do with that foundation?”
In other words stop waiting to be given more creations, and start getting creative with what’s there. Is that sort of what your Emoji Kitchen project is about?
I'm biased, but Emoji Kitchen — for those who aren’t For those who aren’t familiar, with Emoji Kitchen you can input an emoji like turtle and an emoji like hotdog, and then it generates a sticker, a sticker that looks like a turtle dressed up like a hotdog. (Similarly, Apple has Memoji.) None of those characters are in your emoji palette, they're made up. They're evocative of their emoji fonts.
I think those are really important because they say, “Okay, we have a shared understanding of what these glyphs are, but we can do more with them.” You see that already with how people compose emojis together. These are all things that are not standardized by the Consortium, but people are using the characters that they've added to the universal character sheet. To me, the more we can create that flexibility, the more we're going to see. Who knows what we'll see from that?
