Posted by Jennifer Daniel, Emoji and Expression Creative
Director
It’s official: new emoji are here, there, and everywhere.
But
what exactly is “new” and where is “here”? Great question.
Emoji have
long eclipsed their humble beginnings in sms text messages in the 1990’s. Today, they appear
in places you'd never expect like self-checkout kiosks, television screens and yes, even
refrigerators 😂. As
emoji increase in popularity and advance in how they are used, the Noto Emoji project has
stepped up our emoji game to help everyone get “🫠” without having to buy a new
device (or a new refrigerator).
Over the past couple of years we’ve
been introducing a
suite of updates to make it easier than ever for apps to embrace emoji. Today, we’re taking it a step further by
introducing new emoji characters (in color and in monochrome), metadata like shortcodes, a new
font standard called COLRv1, open source animated emotes, and customization features
in emoji kitchen. Now it’s easier than ever to operate at the speed of language
online.
New Emoji!
First and foremost, earlier today the Unicode Consortium published all data files
associated with the Unicode 15.0 release, including 31 new emoji characters.🎉
Among the collection includes a wing(🪽), a leftwards and rightwards hand, and a shaking face (🫨). Now you too can make pigs fly
(🐖🪽), high five
(🫸🏼🫷🏿), and shake in
your boots all in emoji form (🫨🫨🫨🫨🫨).
These new characters bring our emoji
total to 3,664 and all of them are all coming to Android soon and will become available across
Google products early next year.
Can’t wait until then? You can download the font today and use it today (wherever color vector
fonts are supported). Our entire emoji library including the source files and associated
metadata like short codes is open source on Github for you to go build with and
build on (Note: Keep an eye open for those source files on Github later this week).
While
emoji are almost unrecognizable today from what they were in the late 1990's,
there are some things I miss about the original emoji sets from Japan. Notably, the animation.
Behold the original dancer emoji via phone operator KDDI:
This animation is so good. Go get it, KDDI dancer.
Just as language doesn’t stand still, neither do emoji. Say hello to our
first set of animations!!!!!
Scan the collection, download in your preferred file format, and
watch them dance. You may have already seen a few in the Messages by Google app which supports
these today. The artwork is available under the CC BY 4.0
license.
New Color Font Support
Emoji innovation isn't limited
to mobile anymore and there is a lot to be explored in web environments. Thanks to a new font
format called COLRv1, color fonts — such as Noto Color emoji — can render with the
crispness we’ve come to expect from digital imagery. You can also do some sweet things to
customize the appearance of color fonts. If you’re viewing this on the latest version of
Chrome. Go ahead, give it a whirl.
(Having trouble using this demo? Please
update to the latest version of Chrome.)
Make a
vaporwave duck
Or a duck from the
1920's
Softie duckie
… a sunburnt
duck?
Before you ask: No, you can’t send 1920's duck as a traditional
emoji using the COLRv1 tech. It’s more demonstrating the possibilities of this new font
standard. Because your ducks render in the browser (*) interoperability isn’t an issue! Take
our vibrant and colorful drawings and stretch our imaginations of what it even means to be an
emoji. It’s an exciting time to be emoji-adjacent.
If you’d like to
send goth emoji today in a messaging app, you’ll have to use Emoji Kitchen stickers in Gboard
to customize their color. *COLRv1 is available on Google Chrome and in Edge. Expect it in
other browsers such as Firefox soon.
Customized
Emotes
That’s right, you can change the color of emoji using emoji kitchen. No
shade: I love that “pink heart” was anointed the title of “Most anticipated
emoji” on social media earlier this summer but what if … changing the color of an
emote happened with the simple click of a button and didn’t require the Unicode Consortium,
responsible for digitizing the world’s languages, to do a cross-linguistic study of
color terms to add three new colored hearts?
Customizing and
personalizing emotes is becoming more technically feasible, thanks to Noto Emoji. Look no
further than Emoji Kitchen available on Gboard: type a sequence of emoji including a colored
heart to change its color.
No lime emoji? No problem.🍋💚
Red rose too romantic for the moment? Try a
yellow rose🌹💛
Feeling goth?
💋🖤
Go Cardinals! ❤️🐦
While technically these are stickers,
it’s a lovely example of how emoji are rapidly evolving. Whether you're a developer, designer,
or just a citizen of the Internet, Noto Emoji has something for everyone and we love seeing
what you make with
it.
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