The Google "blob" emoji was the peak of emoji design.
I always found them bland. They are not distinctive enough, just like Google's icons.
Covering my blob turtle's ears from hearing this heresy rn :(
Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
81–90 of 105 posts
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#82The best emoji for the way we communicate today would be to revert the water pistol back to a real gun.
Glaring ‘omissions’ are also breasts and penis emojis. Maybe even one representing sexual intercourse. You’ll find they are quite central to human culture.
There's a phallus in unicode but an emoji would be welcome.
https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B8
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#83Having 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…
>problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.
I think this is the funniest sentence I've ever read on Hackernews.
What are we doing with our lives?
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#84It’s not mentioned in the article, but I’m really disappointed that the backpack emoji was made generic and westernized losing its original meaning. It used to be a randoseru style backpack but was recently changed. Does anyone else care though?
Probably don't care.
I have no idea what "randoseru" means, or what kind of backpack it is. Looking it up, it seems to be a design that carries special meaning in Japan, and not really anywhere else. While other countries _may_ have similar designs, it's not something special to them.
Even if the emoji looked like a ranoseru backpack, it wouldn't mean anything to most people. If anything, the front pocket is more likely to be associated with a backpack used for school.
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#85This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much. This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B…
Thanks! That other link was much more informative.
I think it's a bit annoying that for some emoji, they still change the content and not just the style.
It's not as bad as the "gun/watergun controversy", but I think especially that cat emoji could lead to messages being interpreted differently, depending which version of the emoji you see.
The corporate link in the OP was gushing endlessly about the sophisticated ways to communicate emotions that are ostensibly enabled by emoji, so shouldn't then companies at least make sure the emojis consistently show the same thing?
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#86This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much. This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B…
Why did the cat get an evil smirk? It seems like adding rain to the umbrella potentially breaks the existing meaning? What’s the emoji that went from three colored circles on a stick to three completely ambiguous widgets?
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Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did the cat get an evil smirk? It seems like adding rain to the umbrella potentially breaks the existing meaning? What’s the emoji that went from three colored circles on a stick to three completely ambiguous widgets?
You have the order of which are the old ones and which are replacements backwards. The "three coloured circles on a stick" are dango, that before/after is actually a mistake as the before one is the oden emoji, not the dango emoji. The smirking cat one is also a different emoji than the normal cat one, so there will be new versions of both.
Ah, thanks for the info they are different emoji and the diagram is just wrong. Was thinking the same how such a redesign could lead to misunderstandings.
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#88> Emoji with the darkest skin tones can be difficult to see in dark mode — a problem for anyone who sends or receives them. That’s why we built an AI-powered contrast tool that analyzes each emoji at the pixel level, flags when the contrast ratio is too low and suggests high-contrast solutions that are implemented by designers What part of this is AI? What part of that couldn’t have been done without it? Do they just…
Maybe they call any kind of algorithm that accesses the content of media (e.g. pixel colors) and not just metadata "AI" now?
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#89Having 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…
It must be for metaverse projects so that you can walk around to the back of a chat message.
Re: Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
#90OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis
Did you know that new emojis are added in every version of Unicode since it had emojis?