Having read the article, I still don't understand the point of 3D modeling emoji. Even the user interviews didn't mention it, and problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.

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.

> I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.

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.

> You can't really do this.

"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".

> 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.

OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis

They do have to keep drawing them as unicode assigns new codepoints. So they can't really be left alone, other than just leaving the old ones alone and only appending. But I would imagine this trend towards non-raster versions of emojis is more about making updates MUCH easier rather than "innovating emojis" (even if they claim that in their marketing slop)

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.

We have Times New Roman! Stop designing new fonts!

Emojis are more of a unicode standard, they can be re-implemented with various themes to suit modern design trends. There's nothing wrong with redesigning your emojis to fit with the rest of your OS like you would with a system typeface.

Except there's no way for the Unicode standard to be prescriptive enough for the different implementations to express identical intent. And that's before the politics get mixed in (e.g. Apple's water gun). That's why you see many chat services and social networks shipping their own whole and opinionated emoji font: at least on their platform every user sees the same glyph and although there is still room for interpretation and misunderstanding, that's not by having too many font designers.

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Approximately nobody thought Google’s current emoji family needed a total overhaul, stop breaking our pattern recognition for no reason other than your designers are bored and don’t have enough real work to do.

The best emoji for the way we communicate today would be to revert the water pistol back to a real gun.

Does anyone know _where_ these supposed 4,000 OBJ files are open-sourced? They don't seem to be in the Noto Emoji GitHub repo, nor linked anywhere in the article.

I'm wondering the same! How that article has no links is beyond me.

I also like that the article uses whatever system emoji you have, so everything is just showing apple emoji in text for me. All I see are a few 3D video renders of theirs.

I really wish they'd go back to the blobs and stick to them.

tip: on Gboard type the sparkle emoji and then any other emoji and it will suggest the blob version (tho, only as an image)

The Google "blob" emoji was the peak of emoji design.

Getting rid of the blobs and putting a smiley face on 'pile of poo' were sad days.

In today's AI times, I find it a little amusing to think about emojis as an automation of the craft of making ascii art. Is a little different since people don't get paid for that, but there was a creative component to it.

Possibly related: https://gifcities.org/search?q=dollar&offset=0&page_size=200

Would love to see a Google Trends-type dashboard based on Google's "Gboard Federated Analytics" data.

I don't think the data at https://www.emojitracker.com/ is as valid or as frequently updated.

ahh can't wait for 3D "pregnant" black disabled """men""" on my android

Can we please just make emoji bigger onscreen? They're not even em-height most of the time. Most interfaces don't scale the emojis when scaling the text.

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.

What a slopfest. The floating plague in full swing: https://imgur.com/a/IIRIrMI

I just love the "efety Updates" and Android 1.

cool, meanwhile people will use pixelated pepes instead

oh, are they going to adjust the eggplant emoji to match modern usage? And perhaps the peach emoji as well?

If so, I hope they never go from 3D to 4D.

Wasn’t google the one who made flat design popular after we had full 3D and glass aesthetics? Now they want to pretend they “invented” 3D shades emojis again..

> Modern internet culture has steadily moved from mild expressions to drama, hyperbole and overwhelm.

rofl

ROFLCOPTER!

You already know this, but to say the obvious out loud: Google is certainly big enough that they can pay both a 3D-rendered emoji team and a Drive search team. Drive search is bad because the Drive search team isn't working on it, not because they're short staffed due to investment in the 3D-emoji team, who wouldn't work on gdrive even if they had nothing else to do.

It's also crap...

> 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.

I believe you're referring to emotions, which are a separate and distinct concept/term

I believe the point is that emoticons/emoji/kaomoji were never literal, and that it's surprising that anyone whose job is communications-related would say this.

I didn't find it to be AI-generated.

It smells like Gemini to high heavens, how familiar are you with its writing? If nothing else because of the complete lack of relevant links.

(crying emoji) is a masterclass in modern vocabulary... seemed a bit suspect to me. Maybe people are just sadder