Considerations When Designing Your Own Emoji: An Interview with Colin M. Ford of Hoefler & Co.
Emoji are used everyday to communicate online. They’re designed the same amount of attention as fonts in these applications. TypeThursday sat down with Type Designer Colin M. Ford to discuss what are emoji, why we should consider them fonts, and how to start making your own emoji.
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TypeThursday: Colin, thanks for being here for TypeThursday.
Colin M. Ford: It’s my pleasure! Thanks for having me. I’m a big fan of TypeThursday — so excited to be here.
TT: Totally awesome. Okay! I know everyone sees them all the time, but, what exactly are emojis?
What are Emoji?
CMF: Emoji are obviously an evolution of emoticons, smileys, etc… and a lot of people don’t know that they’re actually TrueType fonts. For Apple, their “sbix” table is literally just different sizes of PNGs encoded in the font data. For other companies it’s different tables, like the SVG table for Adobe and Firefox. But a lot people just think of them as icons or images, rather than fonts. Coming from a type designer perspective, they occupy a middle ground, which is an interesting aspect of them.
[Emoji] are actually TrueType fonts.
Another thing that makes emoji interesting to me is that for the large part, they’re the only opportunity in our digital devices to express yourself more; express yourself typographically. Because you don’t get bold or italic in a lot of applications. You don’t get to choose the type size or the leading or the font. You’re very limited in your typographic choices, and emojis help open up a different means of expression.
[Emoji] are the only opportunity in our digital devices to express yourself typographically.
TT: Do you think part of the reason why emojis are considered a discipline of type design is because those emojis are assigned Unicode values?
CMF: Exactly. Yeah. They’re images that are assigned semantic meanings by the Unicode Consortium. Just like any other means of communication, they have a standardized element to it, which makes them very type design oriented. But on the other hand they have an aspect to them, being like little illustrations, that reaches outside of just the normal bounds of type design.
Emoji are images assigned semantic meanings by the Unicode Consortium.
TT: We’ve seen the books narrated by emojis.
CMF: Haha yeah. Actually, funny that you mention that. One of my friends worked at Random House, and she was the author of one of those Shakespeare emoji books. Well, co-wrote it, the other author she worked with was Shakespeare. She did the Macbeth #killingit one. It is very funny. She’s actually gotten letters from teachers that say that it helps engage younger readers, younger than would normally be reading Shakespeare. It helps them understand the emotions a little bit better, I think. So yeah, there’s like a whole big culture that’s grown up around emojis, especially younger people, which is interesting. I think it relates back to them being the one bit of humanity inside of a standardized UI. Because, for some reason, people really attach themselves to emojis. They make pillows and they make books.
Different Emoji Sets
But I’d also like to point out for the most part it’s the Apple emojis that are getting a lot of the love. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s so many other sets out there. Like Samsung makes their own set of emojis, which look fairly similar to Apple, but also Google and other companies have their own sets of emojis that strike different tones. The other day I told that to my fairly tech savvy friend and it blew his mind. It’s important to realize that choosing the Apple emoji set, the ones that we’re all used to, like Helvetica, it’s a choice. It’s one choice, but some people think it’s the only choice.
TT: To summarize, what you’re saying about emoji is much like a letter A, The “A” can be both a semantic meaning and also have a specific visual expression.
There’s no prescription on how these things should look. That’s why there are so many different interpretations.
CMF: Exactly right! Yeah, the whole idea behind Unicode is that a committee will specify a number — a “codepoint” — where the “A” should go, but they’re not making specific prescriptions on how it will look. Their only stipulation is that it should have the connotation of an “A”. You can’t put something that you intend to be a “D” in the “A” spot. Likewise, you shouldn’t put a happy emoji in the sad emoji spot. There’s no prescription on how these things should look, so that’s the reason why there are so many different interpretations of the look of them.
There’s a lot of subtlety in trying to convey emotions and meaning in emoji — similar to fonts in general
For instance, there’s a study that just came out recently that’s making its way around the internet about emoji being lost in translation. Part of the study was that they asked participants to a look at the happy face in all these different emoji sets and on a scale of 1 to 10, rate how happy they thought it was. The Samsung got like a 9-point-something, the Apple one got like a 7-point-something. So there’s a lot of subtlety in trying to convey emotions and meaning in emoji — similar to fonts in general. It’s tough to strike the right tone. Going back, that’s part of the reason why I think they span both type and illustration worlds.
Considerations When Making Emoji Sets
TT: It sounds like certain emojis can be designed with the same level of consideration as typefaces. For designers who want to make emojis, what considerations should they think about when approaching an emoji project?
CMF: Well, from a type designer’s perspective, one thing that I can call to mind right now is there are various forms of how you can make a “g”. You can have two parts to it, or it can have like an open descender or a loop descender. A couple of ways to do it. You have to take into consideration the entire context and history of type design to think of how a “g” should look inside of your typeface in relation to the rest of your character set. So starting out with emoji, it’s important to look at all the sets out there, because, as I mentioned before, there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation.
It’s important to look at all the sets out there, because there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation.
For instance, the Unicode spot for the dancing person just says “dancing person.” It doesn’t say gender, it doesn’t say anything about how it should look, obviously. So way back in the early 00’s in Japan — where emoji came from — Softbank’s emoji set had a dancing lady in a red dress; she looks like a flamenco dancer. Apple carried that through to their set because they were releasing the iPhone on Softbank’s network and wanted to give their users what they were used to. Almost an incidental decision. But in other emoji sets afterwards, not looking at what Apple did, designed it like a man in a disco outfit. So different connotations can come with that.
If somebody meaning to send a lady in a red dress wound up receiving a man in a white suit, there are numerous things that could be misconstrued. For instance, that person sending the message might not be using it as a dancing person or representing dancing; they might have been using it to represent a lady. Like, “There are so many ladies here,” and then sending it to your friend and it says, “There are so many guys here.” or vice versa. Even if it wasn’t about gender, they were just sending it with a bunch of other red emoji and it shows up white. It can get weird. Famously until the recent Android update, people who sent Android users a yellow heart wound up giving them the infamous “hairy heart”. It’s a pink heart with like black hairs coming out of it. So weird! But then again if you were an Android user who wanted to send someone a weird hairy heart you might be disappointed!
You want to know what are the norms so you don’t design confusion. But then there’s some beautiful emojis that you’re free to do whatever you want. For instance, like the alien emoji. If you look across all of the sets that it exists in, there’s a wonderful, weird variety of them. So you shouldn’t just be constrained to what everybody else is doing. Find that middle groove between not wanting to cause your users of your emoji sets to be confusing, but also having your own artistic voice.
TT: Are there technical issues that a designer should know about before starting an emoji project?
A lot of things coming out on the horizon of modifying glyphs.
Upcoming Updates in Emoji
CMF: There’s new things coming out all the time. For the longest time, the Unicode consortium just sat there and came out with very steady little additions every year, but now it seems like they’re adding whole blocks and blocks of emoji each time.
A lot of things coming out on the horizon of modifying glyphs. Right now, in some emoji sets, you change the skin color of certain emoji. In the future, you may be able to add this modifier to change the gender of the emoji. You might be able to change the orientation of the emoji. For example, you have an emoji of a man walking to the left; you could add this modifier to make him walk to the right, which will help in various compositions that I and everybody likes to do.
[Emoji have] broken out into the world. There’s a huge push to diversify.
In the past, a lot of emoji are generally relating to Japanese culture and Japanese life, because they came from Japan. Designing for those could be difficult to those who are unfamiliar with Japanese culture. But now they’ve broken out into the world. There’s like a huge push to diversify emoji, add different types of food from different cultures. It’s great but it can also be a problem. A lot of explosion in the size of the emoji “block”, so suddenly you’re drawing 800 things.
As an emoji designer, I wouldn’t be concerned with drawing every single thing. Try to just hit the high points and just fill in what you want. There’s a lot to add, but you don’t need to be drawing every single arrow and heart emoji — there’s like a million hearts. You don’t need to start right away with every single flag of every single nation. I wouldn’t be concerned with making everything at once.
TT: When designing emojis is there a methodology or a process for which emojis to start first and then work up from there?
Choose a couple essential emojis from each set to develop a style.
CMF: Yeah. In type design, there’s what we would call like a “test word”, which for us at H&Co is “hamburgefontsiv”. Every designer has their own mixture of test word. I’ve been struggling with that as well trying to build my own emoji set. In type design, you drawn an “n”, you’re halfway to the “h”, “m”, “r”, etc. My teacher Erik van Blokland called it “pulling yourself out of the mud” and that stuck with me. I guess if you draw one smiley face, you get the other smiley faces, but a lot of emojis don’t follow each other as formally as type does quite yet. The main suggestion I have is to choose a couple essential emojis from each set to develop a style. Like a couple from the faces, a couple from figures doing things, a couple from the animals and nature, etc.
TT: The challenge of producing an emoji set without a clear precedence makes it exciting.
CMF: That’s part of the fun. Yeah, that’s part of the fun is they’re all very different. It’s a huge effort. I think that’s partially why there aren’t very many type designer-made emojis quite yet. They’re all from the larger companies that can afford to put in the time to making CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) fonts for example, because of the larger character set and all the work that needs to go into it. There are a lot more 1-person latin or cyrillic type shops than 1-person CJK type shops.
With that said, I do think it’s fun to have your own little emoji set, even if it’s not every character. Once you learn the ins and outs of technical side of it, emoji fonts are fairly easy to make and quite fun.
TT: Yes! Colin, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.
CMF: You’re welcome. Thank you for having me!
Want to learn how to design your own emoji? Sign up for Colin’s workshop at CooperType NYC .
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