How can you cut so many budget of so many products and decide "yeah, emoji in 3d, that's what we are going to do!". I don't understand... Maybe they have some AR/VR future usage of some kind?
The difference here is that new emojis replace older designs. If designing a new font meant Times New Roman could no longer be used, that would be a problem.
The problem is that it is not enabled by the mediums we use to communicate.
and are copied and pasted from emojicopy.com and getemoji.com respectively. They appear differently on each website, and yet identical here when copied and pasted. It is not possible for me (or anyone at this time) to comment with two different graphical representations of the same emoji in a comment on this site.
edit: apparently HN is a no fun zone and doesn't allow emojis, but give it a shot and you'll see that they change when you paste them in a new page.
Take the cat from the 9to5 link in the other comments. If I like using the smirking cat, for instance, to indicate potentially devious behavior, I will no longer have that option because they are turning it in to a smiling cat.
It would be possible in editting software, of course, just like fonts, but in messaging (the original and arguable core use of emoji) not so much.
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.
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.
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.
> Approximately nobody thought Google’s current emoji family needed a total overhaul
According to who, a sample size of you?
I don't love their current emojis. The older, flat "blob" style was much better, and if I had my druthers we'd be getting a 3D remaster of those.
> stop breaking our pattern recognition
OS updates will come all the same, it's your job to select and enforce a style that you prefer. If not, your emojis will be like system fonts; outside of your control, changed at the whims of your OEM. And we all know that Apple and Google love breaking your muscle memory.
Google works as an organisation where you get promoted for redesigning stuff. Google will always endlessly redesign stuff and kill products and start new products because that's what it rewards.
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.