
Redesigning Android Emoji – Google Design - twapi
https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-android-emoji-cb22e3b51cc6
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traspler
I am a big fan of the blob emojis from Android 5.0. They are very opinionated
and because of that I think they were amazing at conveying emotions. To me it
always seemed like the blobs had their own character and role they played.
Another thing I loved about the blobs was the consistent neutrality. Gender,
color, social standing didn't matter at all. They were just blob people, doing
what blob people do, display emotion and context.

In my opinion the evolution of the emojis has taken a fundamentally wrong
turn. The introduction of skin, hair color variations, genders, granular
selections in things like a family setup and mixing in humans is, in my view,
fundamentally wrong.

To me the simplicity of the emojis were their main strength. You want family?
Sure, family emoji. But now you have to select genders of parents, numbers of
kids, etc. I think this guides the users into the wrong direction to convey a
completely different meaning.

Maybe helping the user identify with the emojis more is a goal that people
want to reach? I certainly don't. My emotions and context may be culturally
flavored but otherwise quite universal and I think emojis should be the same.

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hocuspocus
I don't care for the gendered/colored emojis, some people want them, I ignore
them, everyone is happy.

But I really don't understand replacing the blobs with yet another boring
variation of Apple emojis, like Twitter, FB, Samsung, ... I'm also a big fan
and I believe it's a unique feature that makes Android stand out (even before
KitKat, the green droids were pretty fun). I always found Android apps that
embed Apple emojis infuriating, but now everyone will get ugly emojis, I guess
it solves the problem.

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tomkarlo
Regardless of what platform you're on, you want your emoji to be similar
enough to those of other platforms so that intent and meaning are transmitted
accurately. This is one of the problems with emoji overall - they specify very
approximately what visual each keycode should correspond to, which means that
you could have two valid implementations that result in very confusing /
inaccurate communication between users on each platform, since they're sending
one thing and the other side is seeing something quite different.

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makecheck
That is not a problem unique to Emojis though. Some people construct multi-
symbol things that would make a screen-reader call them what they are instead
of what they "mean". Take for example the shrugging man made up of slashes,
with a Japanese hiragana right in the middle of it!

It is a fundamentally wrong assumption that Unicode made: they thought if a
code existed for everything, people would always use the code they are
supposed to use. In reality, people seem more likely to choose symbols based
on what each symbol looks like, and make their own composed "words". You
practically need machine learning to correctly decipher what each string of
symbols really "means".

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catpolice
The previous emoji were almost uniformly better looking. It's a shame - they
were one of my favorite features of Android.

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axelf4
Shit, the new ones look bad. It's almost as if they were designed by Samsung.

