About a year ago, professional yo-yoist (and hand-knit Pac-Man Icelandic peysa wearer) Doc Pop submitted a proposal for a yo-yo emoji. He's just learned that it was approved!
He explains how he made it happen (fascinating!) in his most recent PopCast:
Last year I started working on a proposal for a yo-yo emoji, with the helps of my friends at Emojination. It’s been an interesting experience and I’m really excited to say that it’s been officially accepted by the Unicode Consortium. Expect to see it in Unicode version 12, early next year.
Here's what the yo-yo emoji will look like:
You can submit an emoji proposal too. Check it out. Read the rest
An excellent post to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2 WG2 mailing list sums up critical feedback over recently approved emojis, including a fierce denunciation of the (IMHO) excellent "frowning pile of poo" emoji, which is viewed as a slippery slope to an entire "a range of emotions to PILE OF POO."
Read the rest
In what could be considered the modern-day equivalent of gargoyles, architect Changiz Tehrani of Dutch firm Attika Architekten has added ornamental emojis to the facade of a Vathorst apartment building.
According to Wired, he pulled all 22 emojis, all faces, straight from the WhatsApp messaging app:
He selected only faces emojis, for their expressiveness and consistency. “They are really strong, recognizable shapes,” he says. “You recognize them immediately.”
Some architects aren't happy with Tehrani's design choices though. New York Institute of Technology architectural history and theory professor Sean Khorsandi is one of them. He told Wired,
“We’re using copious materials, and we’re taking up land. There is a responsibility that goes along with that. If everything is a joke; reduced to this disposable ‘I like it in the moment’ fad, that’s a dangerous attitude to have.”
photos by Bart van Hoek, Attika Architekten
(Pee-wee Herman) Read the rest
Over at The Nib, excellent historical cartoonist Andy Warner, author of the wonderful Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, tells the story of how the Unicode Consortium brings new emoji into our online lives. From The Nib:
Read the full comic: "Want a New Emoji? Good Luck." Read the rest
Texas and Chile have remarkably similar flags (though Chile got theirs first, by a matter of decades) and Texas doesn't have a Unicode-defined emoji for its flag (just a sprinkling of proprietary ones that do not cross platforms gracefully), so Texans have taken to using the Chilean flag emoji as a shorthand for the longhorn state. Read the rest
Apple's iOS 10.2 update contains two emoji inspired by David Bowie's Aladdin Sane character. The two emoji are named "Male singer" and "Female singer." See the new slew of emojis at Emojipedia. Read the rest
In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created 176 digital icons that fit in a 12x12 pixel grid. Pagers, then cell phones, then smartphones ran with the emoji concept. Now MoMA is acquiring the original set, and MoMA's Paul Galloway will be discussing the collection at Emojicon this week. Read the rest
Update: This post previously left out some important info about the creator Noah Swartz (@SwartzCr) and the Twitter bot (@TinyDungeons) that creates the playable dungeons hosted by Andrew.
I make tiny dungeons meant to look like something out of Nethack - created by @swartzcr - Play my tweets at [this link]
Be sure to follow Noah and TinyDungeons for more fun!
Tiny Dungeon Player hosted by Andrew Faraday (aka @MarmiteJunction) lets you explore emoji-filled dungeons. Eat pizza for health, pick up money, and find the keys while avoiding devils, gators, ants, and other nasties. Read the rest
Francesca4me has created arguably the best Poop Emoji Cookie Cutters on the market, and they come in four different sizes. They include depressions for the eyes and mouth that can be filled with white icing, and the thin lines they cut halfway into the cookie give them the most accurate-looking result. Read the rest
The movie Dune was spectacular but incomprehensible: a boiling-down of a huge science fiction epic into a couple of hours of action. Star Kyle McLachlan, however, can fit the whole thing into a tweet, using only emoji. The Tweeter must awaken!
Read the rest
Available as tees and diecut stickers at Bumperactive. Read the rest
Brett from Mozilla writes, "Codemoji, a game and learning tool that lets you encode secret messages in emoji and then send them to friends for deciphering." Read the rest
Dango is a personal assistant that feeds its users' messages into a deep-learning neural net to discover new expressive possibilities for emojis, GIFs and stickers, and then suggests never-seen combinations of graphic elements to your text messages that add striking nuances to them. Read the rest
Trains Botting/@choochoobot is a new twitterbot from prolific botmaster and EFF staffer Parker Higgins. Read the rest
Just in time for Easter, an easy recipe for making your own marshmallow poop emojis! Read the rest
The New York Times profiles the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit that “serves as the midwife to new emojis.”
People who aren't nerds never cared much about the Unicode Consortium until everyone started caring, a lot, about emoji. Read the rest
Tom Scott built an "full-size, real-life emoji keyboard" from 14 keyboards labeled with 1,000 stickers to cover everything from Unicode 8. "It's a bit ridiculous," Tom says. 👏 Read the rest
