
2015: The Year of Emoji Diversity - nextstep
http://blog.emojipedia.org/2015-the-year-of-emoji-diversity
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anigbrowl
I don't get the point of building Emoji into unicode. A browse of the
Emojipedia suggests that supposedly standard characters look so different on
different platforms as to potentially have completely different meanings to
sender and receiver.

The Emojipedia itself is full of strange cultural assumptions. Following the
links in the text to 'men and women,' two women holding hands could represent
lesbians or 'best friends,' while two men holding hands are only considered as
a gay couple - ignoring the numerous cultures where such behavior is simply
considered companionable. Trying to formalize this into an international
language standard looks like a recipe for toxic politics with a side of
technological confusion.

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ForHackernews
> I don't get the point of building Emoji into unicode.

Yeah, I thought the purpose of unicode was to provide a character-encoding
standard for all human writing systems in current use. Emoji aren't a writing
system. Are they included for some legacy reason?

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thristian
Yes. Back in the days when the Japanese phone industry was an island unto
itself, they had a 16-bit custom character encoding and not enough common
characters to fill it, so various manufacturers stuck UI icons and other
assorted pictures in there. A decade or so later, when Apple and Google wanted
a piece of the market, for interoperability reasons they had to support all
the same glyphs. Since both iOS and Android are unicode-based, the easiest
thing was to get them officially added to Unicode.

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krick
I'm not against people doing weird stuff, so all these smileys and putting
them in every new mobile app and all that stuff is fine. I don't like it, but
it's just my opinion, so that's fine.

But what I'm really against is spoiling one of the most important of all
standards we have now with that. I consider a bit questionable the fact that
emoji (and other inconsistent symbol sets) are built into unicode already, but
considering the time it was done and the origin of those symbols that's
somewhat OK. But, srsly, guys, racial diversity for some smileys in the
unicode? Really? Why not racial diversity for Pacman? It's crazy, really. It's
some symbols that even shouldn't actually be there (in the unicode, I mean).

I guess we really should see that as a problem. Unicode is a complicated
standard. Actual encodings of unicode even more so. Imperfect programs working
on imperfect systems, trying to support that stuff, rendering engines
rendering that stuff, countless font formats and protocols having to deal with
that stuff and et cetera, et cetera — even _more_ so. And unless we are
forking unicode itself with purpose to make "coding standard for sane people"
(and if we are sane, we are NOT doing it for obvious reasons) we must to be
thinking about supporting all insane stuff introduced into unicode itself,
because it is the reason for standards to exist in the first place — to be
covered by implementations. So introducing all that complicated stuff without
any real reason is a big problem, and we should be worried, because it's _us_
who will suffer from awful standards later, and not some guys with fancy
hairstyles doing business with mtv and stuff.

So you want colorful smileys? Use _imaging_ file formats, goddammit. PNG, SVG.
Invent your own markup standard (like {smiley12:asian}) to be used with all
sorts of tweeting apps. Don't mess with encoding standards.

Cannot something be done about that?

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adaml_623
Crazy. The Fitzpatrick scale[0] has 6 entries but they've decided to lump the
white people together as pink people. I know it's not 'racist' but why not
just use the 6 different levels on the scale.

[0] It's fantastic to enable skin tone colours (although technically I think
it's a nightmare) I just hope that I can choose colours that match my skin.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale)

~~~
raldi
I see three different faces on the mockup that could be considered Caucasian.
What RGB value(s) do you think need to be added to achieve sufficient
diversity?

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msoad
Right now the source of truth for Emoji icons is Apple's icon set. I think we
need an open source alternative to that. There should be a set of free and
open source icons for emoji.

~~~
sratner
There is [http://emojione.com/](http://emojione.com/).

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anonymfus
But when will we have an option to change colour of suit in the MAN IN
BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING character?

~~~
stock_toaster
Or the color of PILE OF POO.

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glxybstr
I got the impression that, for those emoji with multiple people (for example
holding hands) there will be variations with the 5 skin color modifiers -
that's 25 (if order matters) new characters to represent the permutations of
one emotion.

We should go back to ":)"

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J_Darnley
WTF? When a character is rendered onto a bitmap it is either there or not.
Where the heck does colour come from? (Aside from AA, Unicode doesn't define
that anyway.) Why on earth is Unicode putting a picture into its encoding?

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matthewmacleod
It's not – it's adding emoji modifier characters, much like there are already
modifiers for adding accents to letters. These characters act to alter
existing emoji – in this case, specifying the skin tone.

The goal is to add additional semantic information to an emoji character. It's
an interesting idea.

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worldsayshi
It would be interesting to see emojis being designed from a more ground up
perspective:

Take a set of emotions, take pictures of people from various
cultures/ethnicities expressing those emotions - use some representative
sample strategy. Publish the database of pictures. Try forming rules for how
people generally express those emotions given relevant variables. Encode the
resulting space into some clever bytecode representation. Now you have a basis
for representing the semantics of emoticons, an alphabet if you will.

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jinushaun
Ugh. Diversity, or dragging along the baggage of thousands of years of racism
into the 21st century. A smiley is yellow. That is not white, black or Asian.
Giving smilies skin color is taking us back to a darker time.

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bshimmin
I've been seeing this around the web today, but sort of assumed it was a joke.
Is this serious? Can't they all just be made to look like characters from The
Simpsons and then, I don't know, maybe people can get on with some more
important work?

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vilhelm_s
I guess the current set of glyphs from Apple/Microsoft/Twitter/Google shows
why this is difficult: [http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/full-emoji-
list.html](http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/full-emoji-list.html)

Most of the "simple" things, like smiling/frowning/teardrop use yellow
smileys. But there are also some emoji like boy/girl/man with turban/police
officer which seem to call for less abstraction, and then the artist has to
pick a skin tone.

~~~
anigbrowl
I didn't realize there were 1430 of them. It reminds me of clipart shovelware
when CD-ROMs were a new thing and people felt a need to fill up all that empty
space with...stuff.

