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Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

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Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#41

Post by pornel »

paxys wrote: post #16
dahfizz wrote: post #11

Are there localized "fonts" for emoji? i.e. Could Apple display the chart in green on iPhones with western system languages, and red on iPhones with Japanese set as the language? Surely this is not the only example where different cultures conceptualize the concepts behind emoji differently. Another (potentially touchy) example would be automatically adding / removing a hijab for emoji featuring women in Arabic iPhon…

The answer to this is kinda complicated. In general terms, it is Apple's OS, and they can do whatever they want on it – so yes, they could display a green chart in some countries. I don't think any platform does something like this today, but it wouldn't be too crazy to add. If we want to talk standards, the Unicode Consortium defines the emoji set as well as loose guidelines on how they should be displayed. The plat…

They already localize them, e.g. in the country iPhones are from the flag of Taiwan is displayed as [x].

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#42

Post by scriby »

The Japanese language actually does have an idiom for "in the red". It's written as 赤字, which literally means "red letter" or "red text". The opposite is 黒字, or "black letter" / "black text" which is equivalent to English's "in the black".

I guess this just doesn't carry over into the charts used in the financial sector?

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#44

Post by derefr »

otras wrote: post #17

For a fun experiment, try Google finance with the Japanese language tag ( https://www.google.com/finance/?hl=ja ). Even knowing about the switched colors, it still fools my eyes. Goes to show how deeply ingrained the usual red/green assignment is!

I know Japan likes red, but I'm surprised that the TSE uses green for a negative/falling connotation. That's not a Japanese cultural thing generally, AFAIK.

Is this just a historical path-dependent thing — e.g. stock-exchange trading floors traditionally all buying their sign boards from some specialty company that produced boards specialized to have exactly two "color channels" — red and green — and then, when the TSE got theirs, it was all they could do to just wire the color channels up backwards?

(I guess there are a few types of meters that always use red as high and green as low — e.g. pressure gauges. But that's because red in those cases means danger. A high stock value isn't dangerous!)

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#45

Post by alpaca128 »

qsort wrote: post #7
deepfriedrice wrote: post #6

Random question: Why are there so many emoji "implementations"? I understand copyright, but is it really cheaper/easier/preferable for all these different companies to design their own emojis?

For the same reason that there are many fonts. Unicode only defines codepoints, like "UPSIDE-DOWN FACE U+1F643", similar to how it only defines "U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL A". I for one believe it was a very stupid idea to standardize emoji, but here we are.

The alternative would be (almost) everyone just using the font with most emoji in order to support messages from other platforms, so sort of a standardization that nobody can rely on. I don't see how that's preferable.

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#46

Post by culi »

otras wrote: post #17

For a fun experiment, try Google finance with the Japanese language tag ( https://www.google.com/finance/?hl=ja ). Even knowing about the switched colors, it still fools my eyes. Goes to show how deeply ingrained the usual red/green assignment is!

Reminds me of the time I heard from someone much older than me that Democrats and Republicans switched from being red or blue almost every year until 2000 when the election results were so uncertain that people got used to seeing red=Republican and blue=Democrat for weeks and the color scheme just ended up becoming permanent.

As a (younger) politics junkie I was shocked even though it makes total sense and I've always kinda felt they should've been switched.

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#48

Post by Ekaros »

bentcorner wrote: post #27
fouc wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8% seems shockingly high, if that's true then it's also shocking how little effort seems to be made to compensate for colorblindness. Why aren't Emojis presented differently depending on type of colorblindness for example?

> if that's true then it's also shocking how little effort seems to be made to compensate for colorblindness. Note that making something accessible to colorblindness doesn't mean you can't use color, it means you can't use color to differentiate. So a graph with a red line is fine, as long as the color isn't what tells you if the movement is positive or negative (and the graph is the magnitude, if that makes sense).…

Also there is varying degrees of colour blindness. I have mild case. Where I have hard time to differentiate certain shades from each other, but clearly red or green is like traffic lights is still easy to distinguish.

So something like a graph might not be an issue if shades are properly selected.

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#49

Post by mudlus »

It starts with knowing why it was originally pronounced "eh-mohjee", and not "ee-mojee".

The better question, then, if you really want to learn about culture, is why red is a good color in Japanese culture.

I'll just tell you: Red is related to sun symbolizm in Shinto, it scares away evil spirits of 'the dark'. And the Japanese emporer (before McArthur said otherwise) was a sun god (descended from Amaterasu). Some Japanese still intrinsictly believe this. This is represented in the Japanese 'asahi' emperial flag with the red circle and red lines, and in the current national flag with the red circle (white is a symbol of purity in Shinto, as well, btw). Torii gates are also red, etc etc.

Re: Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?

#50

Post by monkeybutton »

culi wrote: post #46
otras wrote: post #17

For a fun experiment, try Google finance with the Japanese language tag ( https://www.google.com/finance/?hl=ja ). Even knowing about the switched colors, it still fools my eyes. Goes to show how deeply ingrained the usual red/green assignment is!

Reminds me of the time I heard from someone much older than me that Democrats and Republicans switched from being red or blue almost every year until 2000 when the election results were so uncertain that people got used to seeing red=Republican and blue=Democrat for weeks and the color scheme just ended up becoming permanent. As a (younger) politics junkie I was shocked even though it makes total sense and I've alway…

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