https://medium.com/@agzmn/the-making-of-apples-emoji-how-designing-these-tiny-icons-changed-my-life-16317250a9ee
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#1 xwvvvvwx:
Must be an incredible feeling to have designed and drawn what is fast becoming a core part of our language.
Although looks like the pile of poo and ice cream no longer use the same swirl:
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#2 ElmntOfSurprise:
I liked the old Android emoji much more and was disappointed that they lost the race for becoming the standard. It used to be possible to express the emotion of being content that is not exaggerated by showing teeth or blushing [1], and "weary face" could be used to humorously express exhaustion [2] while it now seems to stand for "my house burned down" [3] (I especially miss "weary cat face" [4]). The Apple emoji look like they were designed for people with emotional agnosia.
I guess one could argue that emojis are supposed to express the essence of an emotion to the fullest extent, but just like with color pigments it is nice to have dilutions.
(At least they got rid of that awful, awful grinning emoji [5].)
[1] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/smiling-face-with-...
[2] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/weary-face/
[3] https://emojipedia.org/apple/ios-11.2/weary-face/
[4] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/weary-cat-face/
[5] https://assets.change.org/photos/2/by/dr/IcbYdrlxwuCPHHJ-800...
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#3 fredley:
See also this interview with Susan Kare, who designed the first set of icons for Mac:
https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/primary/intervie...
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#4 kuroguro:
> I had no idea that within a few months of completing such project, it would revolutionize our culture’s way of communicating
I'm pretty sure emojis were all over the internet before apple - forums, chat apps, IMs etc? Were they the first ones to include them in the default SMS app or something?
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#5 aglionby:
Smilies on the old phpBB [0] forum software etc. must've been around for longer than emoji. This[1] particular set gives me a lot of nostalgia, but I can't remember what forum software it was packaged with. Things got pretty extravagant, I can't really imagine these[2] being useful in everyday conversation (potentially slightly NSFW)! Hell, even MSN Messenger had them.
Looking at these brings back all kinds of memories from the BBs I frequented a decade or so ago.
[0] http://i.imgur.com/LuZeOn7.png
[1] https://4.img-dpreview.com/files/p/E~forums/58700537/8eea8bf...
[2] https://forums.somethingawful.com/misc.php?action=showsmilie...
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#6 asmosoinio:
Can someone explain to me what these parent could be about?
> It should be noted that although Raymond and I, Angela Guzman, are the original Apple emoji designers responsible for the initial batch of close to 500 characters (and were awarded a US patent for them)...
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#7 checker659:
What is Raymond's full name?
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#8 barronlroth:
What about Willem Van Lancker, who claims to have created 400 of the 500 original emoji characters at Apple?
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#9 amelius:
I just noticed that HN strips out the unicode emoticons.
For example here's supposed to be a smiley face:
(but it's not there)
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#10 gadders:
//OFFTOPIC
The author says:
>>Designer at Google with a RISD sleeping pattern.
What is an RISD sleeping pattern?
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#11 erikrothoff:
I remember first seeing emoji on Github and that they were very early those emoticons. I'd love to know more about the story there. I did some Googling and found nothing...
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#12 amelius:
I'm missing two smiley icons:
-big hypocritical smile
-not impressed
And I'm missing the option to create and send my own emoticons as SVG.
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#13 yuhong:
I wonder if Sundar would be willing to attend Unicode UTC meetings.
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#14 undefined:
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#15 undefined:
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#16 undefined:
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#17 ivanb:
Either I'm too old or I don't get how to use Emojis. I only use them to add tone or express my feelings or attitude so I use maybe five to ten most common emoticons. Eggplant, ice cream or almost any kind of other "factual" icons are completely useless to me. I would rather have more readable and expressive emoticons than hundreds of useless figurines. It would be nice to see if people indeed use them.
My favorite emoticons are Koloboks [1][2]. They are very expressive and adorable. There were also static versions of the emoticons and they were almost equally as expressive.
[1] http://www.en.kolobok.us/content_plugins/gallery/gallery.php... [2] http://www.en.kolobok.us/content_plugins/gallery/gallery.php
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#18 draw_down:
Funny to read this here, where emojis are actively filtered out. I like them, I don’t get the curmudgeonly stance towards them which is seemingly shared by, well... a certain sort of person.
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#19 craigsmansion:
These just about symbolise everything wrong with the modern web.
Whereas the humble ascii emoticon was a fun exercise in pareidolia--as an emotional aside to whimsically add a little lightness to proper writing, they have now been standardised, streamlined and commercialised, and are used as a substitute for proper writing, turning everything they're supposed to represent into a lie--a Web of lies.
Popularity seems to be the death-knell for anything cute, quirky, quaint, or mildly amusing with its initial charm being brutally curb-stomped by the one-size-fits-all boot of commercial interests.
> it would revolutionize our culture’s way of communicating
Thanks for that :'( Sic transit gloria mundi. And no, I'm not being snooty: I am that old!
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#20 rplnt:
First of all, I absolutely loathe emojis and hate that they are on by default with no (easy) way to disable (turn into flat glyphs in the color of the text, not :some_stupid_name: as some applications offer).
Having dozens of sets of emojis that look quite different doesn't help either (on web in particular). And there's not that much coherence within the sets either. Apple in particular is really bad at this. For example, beer[1] looks like a photo, whereas crap[2] is in a completely different style. Each individual one can be nice and well thought out, but it makes them all look bad if they don't fit together.
(Twitter's are much better in this regard)
