Emojis: Beyond Words, A Pictorial Revolution

For the past 20 years, emojis have been there in some form or the other. May it be emoticons i.e. :-),and now, the digital versions like Bitmoji, and Animojis(the ones that come to life, invented by Apple).

What is an emoji?

It is the images used to express oneself. It is simply a number/set of bits inside your devices, so when you receive an emoji, you are receiving 0s and 1s. For example the face with the tears of joy “😂” is 128514 in decimal (11111011000000010 in binary). When you are typing an emoji, you type a Unicode character (i.e. simply mapping between numbers and images).

There are a limited number of keys on the keyboard, but these days there are fancy menus that are analogous to having a keyboard with more than 100 additional keys which allows us to include emojis.

How does an emoji become an emoji?

Here are some emojis that are mysterious to me:

Who controls emojis?

The task of standardizing emojis falls on Unicode, a non-profit organization that has nine full voting members as of July 2020. Eight of these are tech companies: Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix and SAP SE. The other member is the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs of Oman. For a full membership, a company pays $50,000. Full Membership in the Consortium gives your company or organization the most direct access to information on the Unicode Standard, the Unicode Locales Project (CLDR), and the Unicode Localization Interoperability Project. Decisions affecting implementation and news about Unicode-related products are at your disposal. You are an active participant in shaping future enhancements to these Unicode standards, data, and initiatives, and you financially support the existence and maintenance of the Unicode Web and FTP sites, where updates and changes are posted. As a Full Member, your organization can participate in technical work and receive one vote in technical committees including the right to vote for the board and the right to vote at Full membership meetings.

Supporting Membership ($20,000) is open to companies as well as non-profit or educational institutions of any size, allowing them to participate in the ongoing work of the Consortium. As a Supporting Member, your organization can participate in technical work and receive half a vote in technical committees. This does not include the right to vote for the board nor the right to vote at Full membership meetings.

There is a loophole to this, you can join in as an individual member ($75.00)! If you are a technical professional in areas of software globalization, software internationalization, or font technology, joining the Unicode Consortium demonstrates your commitment to your field. As an Individual member, you have full access to email lists which allows you to join discussions on the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard. Individual members may participate in technical committee meetings at the discretion of the chair, but not take part in the voting process.

Now, what emojis do you think are missing, and would you like to contribute to the world of emojis? Let’s delve into the workflow of how you can make a contribution.

The first step is ideation of what emoji you want to put out in the world.

Next is a proposal, you prepare documentation for the same. This document is then submitted to the Unicode emoji subcommittee (the aforementioned nine companies).

What does the subcommittee look for:

• Popular demand + frequent request
• Multiple usage/meaning (For example elephant can also mean big)
• Visual distinctiveness- can be recognized easily or not (since emojis have a size limitation)
• Filling gap, “completeness” of the emoji i.e. something that can’t be expressed with the already existing emojis.

What goes against inclusion:

• Too narrow or too specific — say emoji depicting a specific breed of dog or cat.
• Redundant — For example: a variety of similar-looking dishes.
• Not visually discernible — If emojis are small, it’s a matter of concern as they can’t be recognized for what they stand for (this has been a blocker for dishes like Kimchi).
• Can’t have logos, brands, deities, celebrities, etc as emojis (those are not issued by Unicode, they’re essentially stickers.)

The subcommittee will engage in discussions with the person proposing the emoji, and this process may go through several cycles. Once approved by the subcommittee it goes to the Unicode technical committee which votes 4 times a year for productive and potential emojis and approves the entire slate of emojis (once a year) that is to arrive the next year.

Then it takes many months for Apple, Google, etc to add these emojis to all the devices, and tah-dah! it has arrived on your devices! It takes around 18–24 months for this whole process starting from when you propose the emoji and when it shows up on your phone.

Why does Unicode control emojis?

Emojis started in Japan back in the late 90’s. this is the original set that was popularized by a company called Docomo (1999)

This cultural contribution to design history is considered revolutionary, even acknowledged by the Museum of Art in New York City.

In 2007, there was a lot of proliferation of companies using emojis in Japan. Companies like Google and Apple aimed to sell their devices in Japan, emojis became a necessity to satisfy user expectations. This process took around three years to implement.

The mission of Unicode :

“Enable everybody, speaking every language on earth, to be able to use their language on computers and smartphones.”

Three main projects of Unicode:

1. Encoding characters (including emojis)- encoding over 100,000 characters (special characters, different variations of the same alphabet like a, â, á, etc.)
2. Localization resources (common locale repository, “CLDR”)- major info that lets you localize a computer to the culture of a particular geography. (For example: if that place uses a 12-hour clock or a 24hr one? What is an emoji called in a certain language, How do you alphabetize? , etc.)
3. Programming libraries(International components of Unicode “ICU”)- How do you group emojis?, How do you alphabetize emojis? someone has to give you the functionality to be able to do that.

Did you know?

• The mascot of Unicode is inspired by a misunderstanding! A couple of years ago someone made a SEALER but then it was misheard as “CLDR” which is why this SEALDEER is one of the mascots and CLDR is the library of geographic localization.
• World Emoji Day is celebrated on the 17th of July, that’s when you can expect some sneak peeks of the upcoming emojis.
• In 2010, Unicode released its first set of emojis.

• One noteworthy fact is that the “Tears of Joy” emoji was named Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2015, marking the first time an emoji received this recognition.
• In 2016, a 15-year-old girl proposed the addition of a headscarf/hijab emoji.
• To this day, the “family” emoji doesn’t offer skin tone options beyond the default yellow tone.

In 2011, Apple decided to add emojis to its keyboard, which marked the beginning of the widespread use of emojis. We seem to have a visceral desire to express ourselves and communicate using these “small pictures.” Below, you’ll find statistics for frequently used emojis.

Scopes of improvement

Smiley faces have disembodied hands, so it’s a problem to understand if the emoji means hugging or groping hands or jazz hands since you can’t depict the arms.

Certain emojis are depicted differently in different devices, that’s because Unicode tells you what the character is and gives you a guidance image. The way the emoji shows up on your device sometimes varies, it’s because the in-house designers of Google, Apple, Facebook, or Microsoft took this back from Unicode and drew it a certain way. There have been a lot of problems related to this in the past( eg: there is this emoji with X’s for eyes(😵), that is supposed to be a dizzy face on Apple, this design leads to ambiguity as it’s hard to figure out if it’s a dead or a concussive face. So, there has been a lot of effort in recent years to try and get everyone to align and maintain a certain amount of consistency

Now, let’s address your question:

How do you distinguish an emoji from a GIF, PNG, Bitmoji, or Animoji? Distinguishing between emojis, GIFs, PNGs, Bitmojis, and Animojis can be accomplished by a significant criterion: their suitability for insertion into an email’s subject line. If a digital element can be seamlessly incorporated into the subject line, it probably qualifies as an emoji. Conversely, if such integration is unfeasible, the item in question likely falls within the category of stickers. This differentiation is increasingly relevant as numerous platforms have embraced the practice of employing JPEGs, PNGs, GIFs, or compact images as stickers, which can be easily shared with others. In essence, the ability to feature in an email subject line is a telling indicator of an item’s nature within the digital communication landscape.

Conclusion

In the vast landscape of digital communication, emojis are like the colorful crayons we use to express our feelings, filling the gaps where words fall short and creating a shared language that speaks to our hearts. From their early days as simple :-) to the lively Animojis, emojis have grown up, thanks to the diligent work of the Unicode Consortium. So, on World Emoji Day, we celebrate these little characters that bring us all closer, no matter where we’re from, eagerly awaiting the new emojis that will join our ever-evolving gallery of emotions.