Thoughts on Emoji Selection Process

Charlotte Buff via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Fri Aug 10 18:14:00 CDT 2018


 > Extreme Specificity
> For instance, one thing that struck me as odd in previous releases was
the
> tendency to extreme specificity. I always thought of Emoji as symbols and
> not as concrete images.

Unicode is choke-full of useless, redundant emoji that nobody ever types,
all of which were originally justified because of “high usage
expectations”. We’re now stuck with such timeless emoji classics as Water
Polo, Raised Back of Hand, Place of Worship, Petri Dish, and Mother
Christmas while actual, substantial problems in the emoji standard have
remained unaddressed for several years, because the ESC is absolutely
bloody clueless about literally everything they do.

The trouble is not that the rules for emoji submissions are fundamentally
flawed; the trouble is that said rules are completely ignored whenever the
ESC feels like it. A squirrel is too similar to a chipmunk, but a softball
must be disunified from a baseball. A donkey is too similar to a horse, but
we really needed that lab coat emoji because the regular coat that was
added just one year prior just doesn’t cut it. There is no system, and I
highly suspect that there never was one in the first place.
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