Oh hey, it's your building manager texting you so sorry to hear about the death of your pragmantis with a cry laughing emoji. Ali Ward with another episode of Ologies this week. What is it? What is it? What is it? It's emojis? Or is it emoji?
Anyone who tries to police how you pluralize a word, you know there's no right answer. There just isn't.
That is Jennifer Daniel, one of not one and not two, but three ologists we have on this very, very giant and dear to my heart episode about curiology. Jennifer is currently an emoji designer at Google who's responsible for designing a bunch of emojis, some that you're going to love,
like a serious fan favorite, the melting face emoji. And Jennifer is also a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which may have you sitting at home wondering what the heck is the Unicode And I promise you we're going to get into that, oh so soon. I didn't know either, and it's fascinating. So who else are we going to be hearing from? Well, there's Keith Brony.
From a very technical perspective, it's emoji. But if you look at how people are actually using the term, it's emojis, and this is a classic example of language changing. If you want to be really, really technical, it's a Japanese term, and emoji picture character is both the singular and the plural.
Keith is the current editor in chief of Emojipedia, who, after writing his dissertation on the use of emojis at University College London, became the world's first professional emoji translator and shares what I would perhaps describe as an academic perspective throughout what will be this big two parter on this daily part of our lives emoji. And finally Jeremy Birch, who founded a mochipedia that was me in twenty thirteen I did, and until very recently represented Emojipedia in the
Unicode Technical Committee. We're going to get in the trenches of emojis, the real gritty, find the scenes, backstage worlds of face beloved and mercurial little language cartoons. But first we like to do a little thanks up top. Thank you to patrons support us and let us make donations every week to charities of the ologists, choosing for as little as a buck a month. You can join patroon dot com slash ologies, and you make that possible. You
also get to make questions for our ologists. I may be saying your name on the show, but we also like to read a review every week, because, as you know, I read them all and then I pick one. And this week's comes from Andrea O Karina or Andrea or Andrea Okarina, who wrote, Hey, bestie, I feel like Mulder talking to anyone who will listen except to talk about your podcast and not aliens. I hope you read this. Hey,
guess what I did? And maybe I read your name wrong, but I read it a couple times, so hopefully I got it right. Thank you everyone who leaves reviews. I read them and sometimes I weep in the best way. Okay, curiology, let's get into it. I've been waiting years for this. So curiology comes from curiologic, which means representing things by their pictures instead of by symbols, and it comes from a Greek word curio loggia, meaning op language. And where can you kick this off with a bit of debate
about this term with our three ologists. Let's get into it with curiologists. Jennifer Daniel Keith Brony and who you'll hear from first, Jeremy Birch. Now, okay, there is a little bit of controversy about theology.
For this topic is the yes, I love controversy.
Okay, good. So this topic has been the inception of all of ologies, which has changed my whole life. Is a big one for okay, okay, which is why I needed to call in the big guy.
I feel depression, I know, okay.
So ology started because twenty years ago, twenty one years ago, I was on the internet. There was a baby baby website, like a GeoCities type of website, or.
An angel Fire or a classic classic.
And it listed all the ologies and I landed on that page because I was trying to come up with a name for an art company that I was starting, and I wanted to know if curiology was a real word. And I found out via this little website that it means writing with pictures.
Okay.
So I was an illustrator at the time, so like writing with pictures. It definitely I responded well to that, and so I called my company Curiology Forever. But I in the back of my head, I always had this list of ologies that I wanted to do something with,
make a book or do you know it's sad. And so when it came time to do an emoji's episode, I am of the belief that it is somewhat like writing with pictures because you're conveying something, but you're shaking your head a little well nothing, no, no, no.
No, I no, I do I agree? You know you know the first thing. It often happens in any kind of discussion of emojis. Some people feel like it's a language and a way of communicating and it's not. But I think you're right. I'm not shaking my head. In fact, I think I meant to nod, because that's the etymology of emoji. That's what the word emoji means, this picture character in Japanese. So I think you couldn't be more accurate, almost to the actual meaning.
So that you are a creologist, then I love that.
I mean, that makes me sound much more impressive. Thought. Yeah, And how.
About our active Unicode board member and an emoji designer, Jennifer Daniel, does she approve.
A free dictionary is telling me the representation of things or sounds by means of her picture instead of symbols or words.
So would that be I feel like emojis that that applies. And if it doesn't count, you can tell me why.
Geology is great. Creology is great. You know, when I think about emoji, I think historically they are firmly grounded in a visual space. But as we start to communicate outside of SMS text messaging, which is kind of a legacy of the past, it's not a purely visual form anymore.
You know.
It really is supplemental to gesture and intonation and body language and all of these things. But there is without a doubt that emoji have a visual representation, in which case it would be perfectly suitable for creology.
Okay, so far two for two on curiology, which delights me. But how about the current editor in chief of Emojipedia, professional emoji translator, Keith Brony, who literally wrote his dissertation on the use of emojis.
What's his take in terms of being a creologist. I mean, the emoji keyboard is not just a set of you know, literal pictographic depictions of objects. There is a lot of idiograms in there as well. There's the classic heart idiograms, where that's not a literal depiction of a human heart,
but people associate that particular design with affection. There's also, of course, all of the various smiley faces that have those ideograms kind of within them, as well as the face with two big hard eyes as the face surrounded by hearts. There's the face kind of blowing, kind of a kiss that has a little heart they're representing it.
So the emoji keyboard is a kind of a mix of genuine representations of objects, but there's also so many metaphorical symbolic representations of concept as well, So it's kind of.
A mix of both.
In the category of the smiley emojis, I mean, there's so many expressions there that obviously we with our faces cannot literally do. I mean, we cannot turn our eyes into hearts, we cannot turn our eyes into stars.
You know.
The various ways in which sweat drops or tear drops are utilized across the smiley faces are a very cartoonish in nature. I mean, a lot of the design conventions used across the emoji keyboard are drawn from comic book conventions or conventions in anime and manga.
I had no idea about the influence of comic book ard on emoji design. It also came up talking to Jennifer who mentioned the work of Neil Kohne, who's a cognitive scientist and a comics theorist. And Neil was nominated for a twenty twenty one Eisner Award, which is like
the Oscars for Comics for best academic scholarly work. And he wrote a book Who Understands Comics, questioning the universality of visual language comprehension, and that presents this theory that he has that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. So I don't know, maybe we can get him on the show sometime to discuss comics. I don't know what that would be. Maybe graphic nurotology actually scratch that. I just looked it up, and people do
use comicology to talk about this art. We're going to workshop it maybe a later day we'll have that episode anyway, take it away, Jennifer.
He's amazing. For example, he collected a large number of manga and comic books and then all the faces that were in each one of these, created a taxonomy of the different facial expressions and identified sixty nine unique expressions that all had very distinct meaning. So I took those sixty nine expressions and then said, Okay, this one's represented an emoji. This one's represented an emoji, this one isn't oh wow, this one is. This one's like similar enough.
But then there was one that was like paperification because it's paper magazine. Right when the character kind of wants to disappear, they kind of turn into paper and float away.
Oh wow.
And so between that and this other convention, which was changing the opacity of a character to make them all transparent, we got dotted line face, so you're disappearing, and we got melty face.
Wow.
You are able to take these conventions. And that's the thing is, like you're you can never really make something new. I think that's a common misconception that you have to make something new, but it's really something that's existed for a really, really well.
One time, Jared had this viral tweet about how most domestic partnerships are just urgently demanding that your partner look at your pet, like, look at them, look at them, even though they're exactly the same as they always are.
And this tweet continues to make the rounds for years, and I always think that some of the most resonant or successful bits of art or comedy or whatever aren't something that no one has ever seen before, but actually identifying something everyone's familiar with but no one has really named or pointed out, at least not recently. That also seems to be what makes a successful new emoji as well, So the little tiny picture that you didn't know how
much you needed. Anyway, back to talking to Keith about the question of curiology, I asked him if he thought it would be closer to the study of symbolic communication via semiotics.
Emojis kind of sit in this fascinating place because they are a part of our keyboards. So it is fair enough to say that there's a huge element of curiological work in kind of dealing with emojis. There's a lot of semiotics as well. There's a lot of linguistics, there's a lot of design thinking.
Okay, I'm calling that three for three. I think that's a slam dunk. Now. Some could argue that curiology is a more literal use of images as language, like with hieroglyphics, But until we start an IX podcast, I'm standing by curiology, all right, let's get into the history of emojis with Jeremy. When did emoji start?
You know what? So that one of the confusing bits about the early emoji history is just the fact that I guess a lot of us sit around and I say us of I'm thirty eight. So for a reference, So when I grew up, a popular messaging app was MSN Messenger in Australia. I know over here Aol instant messengers popular and they had like Smiley's as well, and people are often like, aren't they emojis too? And they
look very similar. But the reason that emoji became I guess universal, became on every platform is that they existed in Japan and the idea was you could insert them into regular text. You could have some normal text and put it alongside. That didn't matter which SMS you were using which platform, and that's sort of their origin story. And then the world expanded and we needed to be compatible with each other, so the rest of the world
needed emoji support. Otherwise we could talked to our Japanese friends, and our Japanese friends would not be interested in mobile platforms from Apple and Google, which was their priority at the time.
And when it comes to how they're displayed on different phones and different computers. Is there a code that says this is going to be someone weeping and melting, and then every different platform has to have a certain thing that represents that code.
Yes. The origin of every emoji having a name is that in the early days, an emoji had a name, and each platform could do what they want with that. You'd have an emoji that says smiling face and you go easy, oh that, yeah, what, But then you get ones like face with handover mouth And this one was complicated because some platforms made the eyes look like they were laughing, some made the eyes look like they were serious.
So if you imagine a face with a hand over the mouth, that can either be sort of shocked or I'm sorry, or it can be haha. It's very funny. And there's definitely been a plenty of people online who are run into trouble with this sort of influences and sort of a minus celebrities who might react to a news story thinking they're being sincere or you know, shocked, and other people see it on their phone is laughing, which is not what you want to do.
Has that that's happened to celebrities, has.
That it's definitely happened to celebrities.
Oh, this definitely happens all the time, And some quick googling will take you to plenty of articles sharing emoji fails, which mostly seemed to be related to individuals who are just surely trying to express grief or sympathy through a text, usually related to an injury or the death of a pet or a loved one, and they use the crying emoji but accidentally hit the cry laughing emoji, which is
just so sinister and cruel. But I did find one little fun celeb emoji mix up pretty recently, and in September twenty twenty two, when Queen Elizabeth is I passed away, beloved pop Diva Share included in her text a morning, I'm so proud she was a and then added the emoji for a bowl, which looked a lot like Cher was calling the leek queen a cow. Now, initially some thought perhaps she meant to use the goat emoji, calling
her the greatest of all time. However, a student fans did their own like be Booby boob processing and decoded that Cher was actually saying, I'm so proud she was a Taurus because Sha and Queen Elizabeth II apparently shared the same Earth sign in the sun position of their zodiac charts. And the end of that tweet was that Sher was happy the queen had a great sense of humor. So I'm I'm sure everyone in all astral planes got a kick out of it. Cher When I die, you
can call me a cow. It would be an honor anything but the thumbs up. And we're going to get to that later.
There's another instance where the drooling emoji for a while there on some platforms looked like you could barely tell the drool was there, so you might think it's just a nice smiley face. On other's sort of this ridiculous cartoon eyes, giant eyes with giant pools of water coming out the corner of the lip, And if you're posting that, going, ah, this looks nice, you might not have even noticed this a little d let the corner on one phone. So there was an era where that was happening a lot.
And then the last few years the companies have kind of got together and there's a lot more consistency. Now you can be a lot more confident. In the last three or so years that your emoji, it might not have the same style, or might be glossy, or might be flat shaded, but it's going to look pretty close whereas five ten years ago, well it's the wild West out there with some of them.
When it comes to how they're coded, does that mean that different devices have to say, Okay, well, when I get this code in, that means this is going to pop up for it, And so we have to make sure that it's not too different so that the cry laugh doesn't look too weepy on one and have a completely different meaning depending on the user.
Yes. Yeah, And I think that was probably something that was less appreciated in the earlier days of emoji. It really felt like, Okay, here are a bunch of code points, go off and design them, and I everyone went off, and they're like, I just made the most beautiful cucumber. Like everyone went often design their own emoji, And what happened was the opposite of what Unicode wanted to happen, which is that you wanted to be able to send
in any language what you intended to someone else. But if I was sending you a cucumber emoji for my Android device and on your Apple device. It is a cucumber, but it's been cut up.
Oh yeah, depends on the context.
Of why I'm sending a cucumber. Completely different things. Yeah, And noone wants to be misunderstood, and so I think in recent years there's been a real concerted effort to reconcile meaningful variances of interpretation, And the ones that were most egregious were probably the faces, because one, they're emotional, and so those are a lot harder, are like infinite
Prismatic emotions are hard to capture on one image. And we're also evolved to read micro expressions, so even something that's an eyebrow that's slightly less concave then another can be interpreted differently.
Speaking of misunderstood emojis, I think it's safe to say that one of the most famously ambiguous emojis we've all been there is the one with the two hands pressed together. Are they praying hands or is it a high five? Who's lying and I'm praying for closure, I'm going to high five anyone who can give it to me in this case, Keith, give us a hand.
Actually, the folded hands emoji was never intended to be a high five emoji. Now that's not to say that it has never been used as a high five emoji. But if you look at this emoji's earliest designs on some platforms, take, for example, the Microsoft emoji says it actually depicts what the original name of that emoji was,
which was person with folded hands. And listeners can go to Emojipedia, they can go to the folded hands emoji page, they can go down to Microsoft often that they can see all of the historic emoji designs, and what we will see from several years ago is a person with both of their hands folded their face a bit solemn, a gesture associated of course with prayer or maybe not
mastee or in certain countries like Japan, like expressing thanks. Now, if you go to certain platforms and you enter in high five into an emoji search bar, it will suggest the folded hands emoji, which is one of the spaces where this possible interpretation has come from. But if you actually look at how people use this emoji, and it actually is one of the most popular across the world, high five is an incredibly niche use case. I will say this, there is really no right and wrong way
to use an emoji. It all comes down to whether or not the person at the other end of the message you're sending will be able to interpret the emoji correctly.
So there you have it, once and for all here on ologies. Is the emoji praying hands or is it a high five? And the definitive answer is yes. So okay. But let's get back to the early days, the growth and the spread of emoji. When did it make the jump from Japan? Because I remember I didn't get an iPhone until like two thousand and nine or something, and then I remember when my friend Micah sent me the
first emoji I'd ever seen. I think it was like an arm flexing, and I was like, well, how did you put the tiny picture in there?
Good emoji?
Yeah, it's a great emoji. But when did it start to spread culturally?
So around two thousand and nine to twenty twelve, you know, it was almost like a It wasn't deliberate, but it almost had all the cues of a viral soft launch because I was sort of hidden at first, get to download special apps, and so the first time nearly any of a sort was when we had our cool friend who'd send us an emoji and he'd be like, wow, I've got to get that. And and that wasn't intention a little, It just hadn't hadn't finished making iOS compatible
with Japan. So some people knew how to get to it, some people didn't. But really it was around twenty twelve when they became standardized and you could use them on theoretically every phone. And then I don't think that the idea of them being an exciting item of pop culture that we could all rally around and go I love this emoji or I like that emoji, And that would have been around twenty fourteen.
I would say, do you remember when you updated your phone and had it on your keyboard for the first time?
Oh? For sure.
Yeah.
Remember driving from Arizona to California for some road trip and a new iPhone I suppose came out and it wasn't default installed, so you had to download this other keyboard to get it to render. So that predates unicodes involvement in it. But then there's like this big gap, right, like I remember that moment, I remember using them, but now I didn't really know what an emoji you really
was for a lot time. Actually, in retrospect, yeah, I don't know, like you see them in Gmail, Like there was that little lobster guy that yes animation where it shopped its clause. I just used it because he was sassy, you know, and so like that's not really an emoji, but it is emoji adjacent. But that's true of everything.
You know.
You just want to like, what is this new thing?
What is the difference between an emoji and emoticon?
It does depend on who you talk to, but these days we tend to accept that an emoticon is like a text based character, so like the colon and the smile or the equals sign and the bracket to make a smile, that sort of thing. We did kind of incorporate. Also these custom ones on MSN. You type them the same way a lot of your listeners might remember. You would type this smile and then it would replace it
with an image. Emoji tends to be this very standardized set that a committee agreed to, and they're on every keyboard in the world, whereas an emoticon could be just anything in any app.
Well, one reason I've wanted to interview you forever is that you launched a psych called Emojipedia I did, which is a big deal. It is where people go to figure out what is this emoji? How are people using this? What does this mean if I get this? What does it mean if I accidentally give this? So what led you to want to create an information hub for that?
I did like emoticons and emojis, and we all had the thing where we're playing with them. And I've always quite liked technology and get the latest update and see what's in there, and it was exciting one year when no one really discussed this, But Apple, you got your updated your iPhone and there were new emojis there, and like most nerds do, you go to google it, you go to have a look. This is around twenty twelve, and there's just I don't know, no one was talking
about it, and I just figured that didn't make any sense. Well, like people, they weren't a phenomenon yet, but they were pretty popular. I'm like, why are there no articles listing what the new emojis are? That makes no sense to me. So it was as simple as that that it started off wanting to know what the new ones were, and so I'd go through it all list you'd compare notes for friends, or you'd find someone with an old phone and it evolved and over time. So that was the
origin of emojipedia. And then I thought, well, I also want to know what they mean or what they're called. And that started a very long journey.
What was the moment when you decided for it to go from an idea into something real.
I've been playing around for about six months. I was working for universities at the time, setting up sort of their websites and things and trying to convince them to put emojis on their websites. It does some technical issues and they weren't very interested. So it's about six months of playing with them, and then one day I was just like, anyone can set up a website. It's not hard. It's like your ologies angel fire list. Yeah, the first emojipedia is just one page with a list of names,
and it evolved from there. So I would say six months are playing around on then one night of putting something quick together.
That's how it works. It kind of just like simmers, and then it.
Was the name as well. I remember coming home it was my birthday. I've been thinking about the idea. We'd been out for dinner and drinks and like, emojipedia is such an obvious name. It's not doesn't take a genius to come up with it. But I've been playing with the idea of having a site that listed every emoji and what they meant. And I was just like, I've
got to go in. As soon as I come in the door, I had a few drinks, but I could still navigate the computer, navigate the Internet, and I'm just like, surely this is going to be taken as a username and domain name. And it wasn't. So like, that's it. You've got a name. You have to start. You'll be so mad if six months from an hour, a year from now, someone else does this and you think I was going.
To do that, How did you start to fill out what meant what? Because things can mean different things to different.
People, right they can. So I learnt so much. I was an absolute novice. I had no idea when I very first started making this list that they even had an official name each. I just was like, all right, let me put each one down. And then I went, what am I going to call them? And I thought, okay, let me just check what Apple calls them, and I found you could do a text to speech thing, and I went, okay, so Apple calls them, But where are
they getting that list from? And this is when I realized they'd been incorporated in the Unicode standard, which is an international standard for every text character in the world. So Unicode is inscrutable, very hard to figure out their documentation. But they had a list on their site just saying here's every emoji, and I went, oh, I'll use that, thanks very much.
Who is deciding at Unicode, because I didn't know about Unicode until very recently. Who's on the board deciding what emojis exist, what they mean, what they look like. Is there one giant conference table.
There is a conference table. Yeah. So the origins of Unicode are very boring, very noble, very you know, it's twenty thirty years ago. There was no way to have a document that had different languages in it yet to say this document is in Japanese, this document is in English. So you had nerds that are into text and internationalization.
Very smart people came up with this standard. And then when emoji first got incorporated into this standard, you had this esoterical list of little pictures from Japan that a few random guys made up. It wasn't standardized over there it's just however made it up, and then when it became an international standard, the same people who know about fonts and technology, they just sort of by default were
the people who were administering the new emoji lists. So they weren't necessarily qualified as in, they didn't have any special qualification for emoji. They were just text standardization people.
So the Unicoconsortium usually just called Unicode, is an international organization that's made up of a variety of different member companies, primarily tech companies, so like Apple, Google, Microsoft, they basically create this standardization document that talks about how texts should
be encoded across all digital devices. It actually originates from like the late eighties early nineties in Silicon Valley, there was discussions between Apple engineers and Microsoft engineers who realized, if various different computational devices are being constructed all across the globe, we want to make sure that each of those different devices, regardless of their manufacturer, are going to be able to communicate correctly with one another.
Around thirty years ago, the Unicode Consortium was created, and every year the Unicode Technical Committee publishes and specifies the rules and the algorithms and all the properties necessary to achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. And when I say interoperability, I really just mean you can type the letter A and the person on the other end can see the letter A or ALF or whatever letter or language you want, you know, because not just letters, there's
also scripts. But anyways, now it's more reasonable that when you send the letter A from your device, the person on the other end will see the same thing. And that's what Unicode does. They basically say, here's a single character set that covers the languages of the world, and emoji are the same way. A has a code point.
And what is a code point exactly.
A code point is a sequence of letters and numbers that it's like the code, the code that renders any number of things. So it's the code that renders the letter. Okay, so the code for letter A is U double o F one. Oh yes, right, that's just for the capital A. There's a different code point for lowercase A, which is double oh six to one. And that's why there is a difference between a capital A and a lower case A. Now, the way that A presents itself is different depending on
the font you're using. Using comic sands or using all metico what are you using? And emoji the same way. Each one is assigned a code point. So the code point for skull is one F four eight zero Wow. Okay, And every emoji has a code point assigned to it.
So yeah, each one isn't a picture. It's a really detailed and colorful letter, which I feel like there aren't necessarily colors in letters and numbers, but a letter in a font having all of these details, like how are you even telling the computer how to render that?
Well? I mean this is this is where it's interesting when we think of what a font is. What do you think of?
Oh?
I think of I feel like Sarah's san Seraf's italics. I feel like it's it has the bare bones of the structure, but then it modifies it. But I might be completely wrong.
No, But that's the thing is we all come to it with a preconceived notion of how a font should operate. You can change the color, you can change the size, you can change that what it appears, you can change the formatting all the things that you just described. Now, font technology has gotten to a place where you can
do more than that. You can have color fonts, and so color fonts, while not how we commonly think of fonts, is a reason why people don't know that emoji or fonts because it defies how do you think of them?
You're like, no, a font is a real I wouldn't say there is a a large market for color fonts yet because they are more complex.
So I think emoji are probably the most popular use case of a color font. But even with that color, you can't do things to emoji like you can a font. You can't make it aalic, you can't bold it right. So they look like pictures. So you presume it's a picture, and I think that's like a fair assumption to make. But the word is Japanese like emoji is not. It doesn't mean emotion, right, it's a picture character emoji, right. And so if you think about code points, it's the
same thing. There's the picture and the character the code that's defined. So it is inherently a technical artifact. And all Unicode really does is they have a very lengthy spreadsheet of says like here are characters on a list, and this is what they mean, and this is what their names are, and this is how they map between different character sets.
So does that mean let's say this Scholl one like zero f one fourteen, which, by the way, I feel like is a great longhand for one, you want to say that you are dead laughing now, yes.
I really do think this is like how funny short codes work too. The time it takes to find the right emoji, you just don't so you just write colon dead colon, you know, like, yeah, you understand, or just like shock dot gift, you don't even get a gift anymore, you just like evoke the idea. Mm hmm.
Okay. So Unicode does all this cataloging of emojis internally for tech, but how about cataloging them for the public at large, who's using them and misusing them? How did all the internal work of Unicode get out there for folks just kind of casually tippy tapping on pocket computers, us woozy little cows like you and me. Let's back to Jeremy and talk about the growth of emojipedia. Did people take notice of emojipedia and you? Did people start
saying like, hey, what are you working on? Let's show you what we've got coming up? Or when did you start to become an authority in the field.
Emojipedia kind of blew up overnight in a small way that because we started publishing lists of upcoming emojis, which I thought was interesting. One day there was sort of news had not quite leaked, but someone had said, oh hey, this and new emoji's coming out, and when you looked it up, Emojipedia would come up. And I, by that stage, had gone from treating it like a side project to taking it pretty seriously. You'd seen gone from you know, five visits a day to sort of a thousand visits
a day, and then ten thousand visits a day. So this is something about a year in and then I went all right, I've got to clean this site up with it. Ah, I've done it. But it was a lot of late nights and kind of asking my friends, hey, what do you think this face? You know, I've got the official name here, but for the meaning of what does it mean? There was a lot of just me looking at it and going, this one looks the same
that one, but it's a bit happier. So that would be the description for the first year.
So while describing each of the emojis was challenging just in its most basic definitions With the constant evolution of emoji and culture, how does emojipedia keep up with the ever evolving definitions. Just thinking about it, it makes my stomach hurt. It causes me a sense of overwhelmed vertigo. How does an expert cope with this? I asked Keith.
There is a lot of social listening involved. There's a lot of kind of data that we're pulling from various sources that we're able to do so, but also there's a lot of crowdsourcing that is involved as well. We have to be tipped off to a certain thing maybe happening on one platform versus another, and we're so lucky that we have such a global user base that's very invested in the reporting that Emojipedia does and maybe tips us off that, hang on, have you seen this happening
with this emoji? And we'll kind of jump in on the beginning of an emerging viral trend. That was the case with, for example, the triangular flag emoji becoming the go to symbol for conveying the sense of someone has a red flag. You know that term where someone's got a red flag. There's a behavior that's incredibly counterproductive or a very very negative that gives people to use dating parlance. The ick that emoji had existed on the keyboard for
an incredibly long time. By and large, it had always been conveyed as a little red flag, little triangular red flag, but it never really was used to convey that term. Up until one post goes viral. We get the tip off. We kind of monitor the situation. We kind of look into our social listening tools and are able to see a spike in popularity and see the change in terminology
that's being used alongside the emoji. People by and large use emojis as punctuation with text, So when you see social posts, emojis are going to sit in the same place by and large that you would expect to see, say a full stop or an exclamation mark or even a question mark, and then you're able to really see, okay, this is what the topic of conversation is in relation to this emoji, and we monitor how it kind of progresses.
You see this all the time as well. This saluting face emoji is another one that kind of jumped hugely in popularity recently, actually during the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk. As you know, people were being made redundant, left, right, and center. They were kind of signing off with a salute emoji. And what we found was that emoji quickly quintupled in popularity, and though it dropped up quite dramatically after the kind of initial forraar its popularity, it's still
more than double what it was before. People almost were made aware that of this emoji's existence on their keyboard after its morality, and now it became part of their more broad emogi lexicon.
Okay, so quick aside, just because this made me think about an emoji which once I became aware of it, I started using all the time. And it's this little eight bit goblin dancing thing and it looks kind of like a purple space invader, and Emojipedia told me that it's actually known as Alien Monster. I started using a year ago with my friend Micah, basically as a way of just rating how much I do or very often
do not have my shit together. Like I'll say I'm at like three out of five goblins today, I'm hanging on. I'm not doing that bad. And I know we all have secret meaning ones, but the Alien Monster, it's one of my favorites it's just pixelated chaos. But what about Jeremy as the founder of Emojipedia, what's his favorite? What's his little Darlin? Which emoji do you use the most?
I get bored of the same emoji, so I like a new one. The melting face has been excellent, and raising me is one of the best new auditions. I think, what do you think about it? The melting face? I just like any that are conflicting, which defeats the purpose in some ways. Every confusing one of my favorite ones that adds ambiguity in there. And the melting face is smiling, but it's melting away. I just I like that. I think it adds some realism. It's like talking in the
real world. Just a plain smiley is just na boring.
What about the skull for dying laughing? Do you enjoy that juxtaposition of meaning an image.
I like that it exists. I first these things happen when I was running a mojipedia. I think that we saw this skull come out of nowhere. That Apple one day released a list of they're trying to shof some privacy feature, and they showed off their top ten emojis use in my message and this is a good year or two before I'd seen mainstream use of the skull. It must have been happening. It was in the top ten and I had to go, what is going on? Why are people using this? And clearly it was happening
in younger communities and now it's very widespread. I can't use it myself. I feel like it belongs to the next generation. I don't think I can sincerely put the skull. What about you?
Can?
You can you see skull emoji laugh?
I can do a skull emoji for laugh, but only when it's also very flat face, like I'm dying laughing. Also, I do want to die from this, so it has to have a double meeting, and I would only use it in very very intimate context. Probably, I wouldn't just like text a colleague or you know what I mean.
Yeah, colleagues get the top five generic ones, the laugh, cry, the smile, the thumbs up, right, I think it's about it, that's it. Yeah.
I feel like I used the anguish face a little too much, and I like.
The English face has a lot of emotion on one face.
So much, and I feel like if you had to mind my personal data to see like how my mental health is going. At certain points you would be like, she's using the English face a lot, like she must be on deadline.
We all use the same ones, the same two tears of joy and heart by a large margin, like one in five emojis shared is the tears.
Of joy really oh yeah?
And then the red heart for obvious reasons, and then there's a long drop off.
We saw a huge jump in usage over the last number of years in the loudly crying face, the emoji with these two kind of water fall esque tears running down its face, which was initially created to convey genuine sadness like absolute despondency, abject melancholy, but because of how incredibly over the topics design is, younger generations particular began to co opt it as oh my god, I'm so overwhelmed, which can also be used to say I'm so overwhelmed.
Because of how hilarious this is or how cringe inducing it is, It's actually quite diverse, and of course, one thing that we've certainly seen occur in the emoji keyboard as things have evolved over the years is kind of a much wider embrace of the ironic use of emojis, Millennials and older generations by and large tend to use them in a more earnest fashion or stick more closely
to their intended meaning. So if they wanted, for example, convey a sense of kind of awkwardness, they would opt for the emojis that have been kind of created to encapsulate that sensation, so the classic kind of upside down face or more recently the melting face emoji. But more and more we're seeing reports of younger generations kind of got a lot more playful when it comes to the emojis they are opting for to convey kind of a sense of awkwardness. There's a lot more kind of sargonic
emoji use. We've seen reports of people using the cowboy hat emoji, for example, to convey a sense of awkwardness, because it's just so absurdly happy, and it kind of could convey in a certain context, just an awkward Okay, I've just got to go along with this, even though I don't feel it's appropriate for how I'm feeling at this moment in time, because I'm sitting here, big goofy
smile on my face, cowboy hat on again. Metaphorically speaking, just having to kind of go along along with this bizarre situation I'm finding myself in.
Okay. So we're going to get back into how these new uses of emoji began and how Emojipedia keeps track of them all. But first, every week we donate to a charity of the ologist choosing, and this week it's going to none other than Unicode. So the Unicode Consortium. It kind of sounds like an evil corporate empire, but surprise, it's cool as hell and it's a nonprofit. So Unicode
is a five oh one c three nonprofit. It was found in nineteen eighty eight and it involves hundreds of professionals, so many volunteers and language experts who are helping create and manage standards for software that's deployed on more than twenty billion devices around the globe. And it's uniting us in language and giving greater access to expression for so
many people. So thank you Unicode for allowing us to text a drooling face emoji to an X at one point fifty four am and at least be understood, if not well received. And also thank you to patrons and sponsors of oologies who make those donations possible. Let us celebrate emojis the next few weeks. It's World Emoji Day July seventeenth. How can you celebrate. You can toss a couple bucks at Unicode. I'm sure they'd use it. You
don't have to because we did, but you always can. Okay, next week we'd have part two with all your questions, but for this part one, let's keep our butts at the edge of our seats. Learning the history and the basics of emojis and they're constantly evolving meaning and how does Emojipedia track them? When it comes to who's making the trends? Did you find at some point like, oh, things would start on TikTok and then they would go to Twitter and then like is there a waterfall effect?
Like where does it start?
As far as we could tell when we say, a couple of years, and we needed to hire data analysts to figure out what's going on. Right, Twitter was easier to mine for data, which helped us see trends in big ways. We could analyze fifty million tweets or one hundred million tweets, But it was clear from some of these reports from companies like Apple whether selectively show you stuff that was happening in private messaging. As far as I can see, It's happening in private messaging first in
small communities. Small groups have a little shared I say, language or something that you use between your friends, a little fun idea for an emoji, and it spreads from one to the next. It probably moves privately to Snapchat, and then you get these blurry mixed private public platforms Snapchat, Instagram. TikTok is obviously a massive cultural hit now. You know, TikTok is setting the Internet culture now, no doubt that
is where it's happening now. But at least when I was running at a Twitter was the easier place to see the trends as they hit the mainstream.
And of course a lot of social media platforms today have very different genergraational demographics. I mean, I don't think it's surprising for most people when I say that Facebook tends towards older millennials to older generations in terms of
its kind of active user base. TikTok is primarily gen z and you just have platforms like Twitter that kind of exists across different generations, although it deals again kind of skew millennial and older and you can actually see completely different trends between these platforms when it comes to certain emoji usage. So across the likes of Facebook, say the face with tiers of joy still absolutely rules the roost in terms of the go to emoji to convey laughter.
When you go to TikTok, for example, the face with tiers of joy still crops up. Absolutely. It's still the number one emoji in the world across all social platforms and messaging apps, but it is deemed a little chew gee or cringe. Very okay, boomer.
Perhaps what about emojis who's meaning between different groups might be very different, Say the water droplet emoji, which some very sweet and tender souls may use only to mean something straightforward, perhaps like your mima reminding you not to forget an umbrella because it might sweat droplet outside. Does Unicode worry about regulating that at all?
I mean, you know, I sometimes choke that every emoji is a sex emoji. There's something when you're working in a vacuum. Yes, those anecdotes are really funny, and I love them and I will use them all the time. The reality is is that eighty percent of the time emoji are used, it's alongside words. So if I'm writing I'm so horny for you, and I use that emoji, there's no question about what I mean, right, Yeah, no
ambiguity there at all. And if you're trying to be clay and not be so overt, then maybe, but like if you're having like a heated conversation, it won't happen, right. So one of the things I do love about emoji is that it is a parallel to how we already communicate. So think about body language or eye contact, like being what might be considered too close physically to someone is considered culturally appropriate in some parts of the world and not appropriate in other parts of the world. Or even
hand gesters. Certain hand gesters are more lewde in one parts of the world than other parts of the world, and so you have to respect that culture when you visit those places of origin. And part of it is being aware, part of it is learning through experience, And I do think what is great about emoji is that they don't need to be globally universally understood. You know, there's the mate emoji, which is a drink from a couple of different places, but it basically is brown. It
almost looks like a coconut the straw on it. And so if you're from Uruguay, you'd be like, I know what that is, Mattae, I love mate. Thank you for the mate emoji. You talk to someone from like Montana who has not familiar at all with mate, they'd be like, oh, there's a coconut drink. I've seen that before. You know how to use it, like I'm going on a tropical vacation. Yeah,
And that doesn't mean it use it wrong. It's like they use and it was effective to communicate what they needed to say to the person they were talking to.
Yeah.
And this is just like the Tower of Babble all over again. Platforms like Twitter, where you have a global audience, it's really important to understand who your audience is, yeah, versus like shit talking a girl friend, Yeah, do you mean anything? I mean, I use pop prints instead of a heart to indicate, just like pet names that we have for our loved ones. People use emoji in very personal ways.
Well, I wonder if there's anyone that goes by just an emoji kind of like a mononym, you know, like Sting or a Beyonce or a Zindaiya, Like, is there anyone that's just represented like prince Prince was the initial just call me by this symbol from now on, And I wonder if there's anyone doing that with just an emoji legally.
Well, certainly we're seeing a lot of folks try to use emojis as a kind of unique sign off or fandoms, you know, representing their kind of topic of interest with specific emojis. I mean, you mentioned Beyonce there. The B emoji is very synonymous with emoji because of the behive, and the purple heart emoji, for example, is used hugely by fans of the K pop band BTS. So there is certain emojis that are associated with certain kind of performers celebrities. Now that's not to say that emoji is
definitively theirs. Of course, the emoji keyboard is there to be utilized by all of us in whatever way we fancy, and it ultimately comes down to whether or not the receiver of a message we've crafted with a particular emoji will have interpreted as the way we've intended it to be interpreted or not. And that also comes down to whether or not that person is within the same quote unquote in group as me, like, are we both members
of the BTS fandom? And will that other person know when I use a particular emoji that I'm referring to this member over that member, And that all comes down to insider knowledge based on the community we're.
A part of.
But that also scales up to a variety of different cultural instances. And in fact, if you explore the emoji keyboard, there's a huge host of emojis that are there that represent certain attributes and aspects of Japanese culture coming from their Japanese origins, that many people in the Western world would look at and have no idea what this kind of concept is there to represent, and that means that
they may just not get used. It also may mean that they'll kind of be picked up and viewed with a new meaning in a certain context because the meaning for that group of people at the moment is not particularly explicit. And then you'd see these kind of divergences across different cultural demographics or geographical demographics in terms of how certain emojis are being used to convey different concepts.
But there's also you know, emojis in their food. The animals that yes are associated with a very definitive thing in the world, but emotionally speak can be co opted to mean a different thing amongst kind of different group of people, and this can be between a couple. There's an excellent academic paper called why Pizza Emoji Means I Love You from several years ago. It talks about how couples will repurpose certain emojis between each other to kind
of convey new information. It can scale up to friend groups with their group chats where they all have shared experiences their friends. They're hanging out and a certain thing happens to one member of the friend group and there's a perfect emoji there and the keyboard to be used to represent that silly or amusing situation, and that emoji
becomes a shorthand to reference that situation. Or it can kind of scale up again to other different demographic groups where you're seeing emojib used to represent this concept for this demo group. You can see so many different colorful
emojis be used in combination. One aler to represent sexual identity or represent sports teams, things of this kind, and say, well, I'm going to use the blue and white heart emoji beside each other represent my local sports team, or you know, the light blue heart emoji and the pigcarck emoji to represent transgender identity. These are things that people can look
to the emoji keyboard to communicate. They can get very, very playful with them in there, but you know, ultimately, the beauty of an emoji and the utility of an emoji is in the eye of the beholder.
And just because experts and designers are more than happy with emoji definitions being so fluid and alive, it doesn't mean that people aren't out there trying to define them exactly as possible and assign them one singular, definitive forever meaning for their own self serving purposes. And those people are lawyers.
The number of defense attorneys that came to me over the years that are you serious because they're arguming us so funny? How is always the same. I never actually got called into court because they never liked what I had to say. Because what that ostensibly want me to say is that whichever emoji they're defendant put at the
end of their message meant that they were kidding. They normally say something horrific or something some implication of any kind, and they go, oh, but there was a wink at the end, Your Honor, So clearly the wink means, I mean the opposite of this horrific message. Ah, I didn't really mean I wanted to do whatever I was going to say that I was going to do. And obviously I can't say in good faith that's what they meant. I mean, clearly, i'd have to say they probably didn't
mean that. But at the very least i'd say, well, there's no one writer wrong answer. But they would pull up and maybe a line from emojipedia and go, well, this emoji you've said here says may imply joking or laughter, and you go, yeah, it might. It might not in this context it doesn't, but it might. So there's been
other court cases where emojipedia gets brought up. It was one with Jeffrey Rush a defamation case a few years ago where emogipedia was sort of brought up to the judge and they were debating whether it's reputable or not to say, here's a reputable website, your Honor, and here's you know, the emoji that my client you and you know this is reputable, and then the other side saying, nuts, is it reputable and yeah, it's that's the thing. People want a finite answer. What does this emoji mean? And
there just isn't. It's like human expression that it can mean lots of things.
Have you ever had to go up on the witness stand?
No, no, it was always the defense to one of me. And they do this little thing which I've never been in a position to want this. But when they do a pretty little interview, they talk to you, they pay you for your time for an hour, and they basically find different ways to ask you. This means that we're kidding, right, And then obviously an hour later of me going no, no, I mean i'd have to say that it's context dependent and do you want me to comment on this message?
No, no, just in general this emoji? What does it mean?
No?
And I go, well, it means three different things. It can mean happy, it could mean joking, it could mean curious and so funnily enough, I never got the call back from any of these Yeah, you.
Won't be needing your services after us.
That's almost word for word what they would say. Oh you just would hear nothing, thank you for time, Please send us an invoice, fear.
Else will they just send you an upside down smiley face? Yeah, what does that mean to you?
By the way, upside down is one of the clearest is sarcasm. It's found its place on the internet. Is one of the few that most people mean sarcasm, or at the very least, Ah, I'm not feeling and I'm feeling a little bit up in my head today, or some kind of things aren't right. You know, it's upset in some way. But sarcasm is the closest word to describe it, and thankfully that one is mostly used in that way. I don't think there's as much confusion on that as say the wink or the smile.
What about ones that are so passe, that are so how do they say chuggy shuggy? What about what's the most just what's the most embarrassing emoji?
I mean it's got to be the laughing, crying? Yeah right, I mean both both, because when people say it's overused, it is because it is the most popular emoji. So you're going to have that?
Is it the popular?
Still the most popular emoji?
What about the tears streaming down the face?
That's definitely coming in the two of those A neck and neck depending on which platform you're on. Okay, yeah, they're both very emotive, so they're both useful. But I think it got overdone by grandparents, by meme pages, by corporateness, and I get it. It's very clear. I'm laughing at this. It's a haha emoji. But it's just you see it so much. It's hard to use. It's hard to use.
Now, do you think things start in personal chats? Maybe they go to Snapchat and then they go to Slack to die?
Yeah, corporate anything that makes you feel like you're a work has to die in your personal life.
Yeah, that's so sad. But what about the emoji that have gone so far past popular usage that not even corporate uses them anymore, or worse, maybe no one ever started using them. What about the least popular emoji and who invited it to the party.
Back several years ago, it was revealed that on Twitter, the aerial tramway emoji was the least use emoji of the entire emoji keyboard on the platform, and that actually drove users to use the aerial tramway emoji to try and up its usage across the board and remove it from being relegated as the last place emoji in the world. I'm going to quote the current head of the Unicode
Emoji Subcommittee, Jennifer Daniel. They've said that there's so many emojis and the emoji keyboard that you don't get a lot of love, maybe because they shouldn't have been turned into emojis in the first place. The emoji keyboard is a bit of a quote unquote junk drawer. But when you see one of those emojis, like, for example, the chair emoji, crop up, it's just a case of like,
oh wow, someone's really exploring the options there. And in fact, the chair emoji was not too long ago the subject of a bit of a viral trend on TikTok where one influencer declared that they were going to use the chair emoji as a symbol for laughter, and it caught on for maybe twenty four to four eight hours, so you'd see a lot of chair emojis in TikTok comments, and of course that was incredibly confusing, and it was just a case of this influencer's following decided this would
be a funny way to repurpose an emoji in a really kind of humorous and confusing manner. Now, that didn't sustain itself because of course it was based on a joke as opposed to actual utility. But even those kind of emojis like the chair, you could kind of even go like the sewing needle. There's so many different emojis that are out there that are just not getting a lot of love. But when they kind of crop up,
I've never really grown. I'm just like, oh cool, someone's really really diving in deep there.
Let's talk thumbs up. Why is it so passive aggressive? Why does the thumbs up get thumbs down?
My feeling is the reason why people think it's passive aggressive is because the person using it is passive aggressive, right.
It sums up.
I mean, it's a lot of boomers, right, and their conventions are more formalized, and maybe they're being more passive aggressive than your friends, and so it's associated with that. But you can use thumbs up. You can be a cool dude glasses base and the thumbs up and be the thuns like this a super cool way of using it.
It's like anything else. It's just you use things with intention and feeling an authenticity, and if it's not authentic, people can tell but just like, good job on that report thumbs up and you're just like, oh you too, you know, and so that is probably indicative of larger communication breakdowns than the thumbs up.
Yeah, that's a great answer. What do you think is the most underused emoji? What's the one that you're like, this one even exists?
Hmm. I mean there's some rubbish symbols at the end, little they stufflessly. Even in recent years, I found some of them that I was on the committee that approved a bit boring sort of I know, and I'm sorry. You've probably got quite a sciency group that listened to this. But the lab coat emoji and the test tube, I mean, they're fine, they're fine, but they get so little use compared to the faces and the flowers and the nature that they're like very job specific.
Let's say, what's one that you wish existed?
The emoji that needs to exist that I don't think will happen, but it does need to exist. It's one that did exist on MSN Messenger. It was an open hug from one direction and then there was a reverse one pointing the other direction. So someone sends you something sad or good news, anything you can send them the open hug, and they can send you the reverse of it to hug you back.
Oh that's so reciprocal and I love it.
And that needs to exist. Instead there's a boring hug of two silhouetted people hugging, and that is very corporate and doesn't make anyone feel warm and fuzzy. Some platforms make it look better than others. Google's one's a bit clearer than Apple's. But it was one of these issues of the gender and the skin tones that if you had every man, woman, non binary person with five different skin tones, you'd have suddenly had hundreds of hug emojis that are tiny. Stough, Just a.
Quick aside, just a heads up that we're going to cover this topic of diversity in emojis and representation and the purposes of emojis, say versus avatars, and a lot more in part two when we return with your questions. Oh it's so good, it's so nuanced and interesting, So come back next week for that and a whole bunch more. Okay, sorry to interrupt. We're back in.
Whereas back in the day, one benefit all these early platforms had they were so small you couldn't really tell. The hug emojed on MSN Messenger, you couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, just little pixels, right, You had no idea, so you could make yourself that person.
How lucky were we that there was a germ emoji that actually was a coronavirus?
That was exceptionally lucky. Apple's design was the more popular of all of them. I think a few of them looked a bit different early on, but yeah, what incredible timing that became. That was briefly the top of emoji being used, just like you want to talk about this new thing. It takes over the world, and you've literally just approved an emoji for it.
It was also a huge jump in use of the of course, face of medical mask emoji, which had actually existed on the emoji keyboard since the very beginning, was actually one of the emojis that was there from some of the early sets created in Japan in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands.
Another popular COVID emoji the syringe and vaccinations. Do you remember, though, when the syringe used to have drops of red coming at the top. Who got to decide when the syringe stopped being a tiny blood fountain. Were you on the board when they decided to make the syringe not have blood gushing out of it?
Well, because the committee doesn't decide what they look like. There's this weird dance that all the companies are at the meetings. Apples there, Google's there, you know, Twitters there. They all have their own designs, but the committee doesn't really say here's what it should look like. That goes back to probably when Apple changed the gun from looking like a real weapon into a water pistol. And they
did that without consulting anybody. Ah, and fine, I don't have any I'm not I have no pro gun stance. It didn't bother me being the gun on the keyboard. I think Apple thought they were doing a good thing. I think they thought, great, we will be a responsible company. There's a gun problem in America. We will remove the gun and will redesign it, make it look like a water gun or a water pistol. And that was complicated because it meant that other phones did not do the
same thing. So I could send a toy gun to you and you could see it on your phone and see a weapon. Oh, so there's a practical issue and then there's also just the other companies probably feeling a bit cheesed off, like it's Apple over here, like making it tough on us. Now we didn't do anything. We stuck with the status quo, and now they've given us an issue. Now we have to change outs on, not change ours. Like we're meeting together, why don't we agree
on these things? So the syringe of the same sort of thing. I don't think the committee ever officially decided, but maybe there might have been a bit more collaboration behind the scene, maybe a little bit more just they were thinking a maybe we might bump the blood out of this, and someone else goes, yeah, me, we might, we might do So I think it's a bit more like that, a bit of wink nudge and see what happens,
see what the big players do. And if you're a smaller tech company you don't have much choice.
Were there any of those meetings people was just fighting sometimes me really No, I mean they're very cordial.
Everyone's everyone a tech professionals, and more recent years has been a more diverse group of people, sort of linguists or lexicographers, people that bring non tech backgrounds, which is very helpful. No it never got a motive in the sense. But you know, sometimes you're just saying no Tom. You know, you're saying no torn emoji. And sometimes I would think
some of the boring ones. I don't think I necessarily made a stand against the lab code or the test tube, but nonetheless some of the boring ones, I'd be more likely to say, I just I think it's fine, but is this the priority? And sometimes you go you do it in meeting ease, you know, you go around in circles and you bring it back and it gets retabled next month or next week. There's no there's no fisty cuffs on the board.
Speaking of discussions about what emojis look like and also what emojis we get to have. Is it all just nerds at the big conference table having polite arguments. Is there any way that, say you or I could petition to have an emoji added? I mean, what if I and a lot of people maybe need a I'm showing up to your barbecue and the leggings I slept in hope that's cool emoji or something that connotes, Hey, I hope you had a good time hanging out last night.
I'm texting you after the hang to make sure that you also thought it was a good hang. How can we get one of those emojis?
There's two ways to answer this question, okay. One is Google Emoji proposal, and you'll find a website unico dot org where you follow the instructions sort of like writing a dissertation though, but it's open to the general anyone can proposal. But it's not like change dot org. It's not like write a petition and get your signatures and once you hit a certain number, becomes an emoji. It's not it's not how this works. It's it's more in the space of academia.
When it comes to making new ones, who's designing them? And what is the process of actually designing them? Because I imagine we use them so teeny but they must be designed on these big monitors, right, they're like shrinky dinks. I just realized they're like digital shrinky dinks, you know, like that's it's.
Well, they're okay. How do we answer this question succinctly without getting too wonky about designing fonts?
Oh?
We love that.
I mean it's true. If any podcast is going to get wonky.
About designing, yeah, get into it.
So anyone can design an emoji, right, just like anyone can design a font. In terms of the process of designing an emoji, I mean they're all so different, everything from the seemingly inconsequential like what side eye the tears should be on for this, how melted should the melty face be? Or what direction should the teapot face? Or what color should that bucket emoji be? There are so many different considerations, and so phoenix okay, emoji coming out?
Okay.
The phoenix obviously is not a new concept. It's been around for a long, long, long, long long time, and its conventions are fairly similar because it exists in lots of different culture. The phoenix emoji appears in Greek mythology, it has representation in Asian culture, and it means all different kinds of things. Obviously, it can mean rebirth, but it also can mean love, it can mean nobility, It can mean a number of different things depending on its roots.
It has roots in Egyptian culture and Slavic culture and Turkic culture, and so the phoenix had global representation because it could be found in a number of different cultures around the world and throughout history. So how that influence the design well, as you can imagine the way it looks in Chinese culture isn't exactly the same as it is in Persian culture or an Egyptian in Turkish, And so how do you design a phoenix that can represent
all of those different cultures? And then generally what I do is rather than saying, oh, let's pick Slavic because they have less representation in the keyboard, which you could do, instead, what I do is I kind of don't pick any culture over another one, and I just pick a little bit of each one. And so no one's happy, like everyone's al Frankenstein in there. But the phoenix, in terms of a symbol, is iconic, right. There are certain things that we understand it to be. It's gesture where it's
wings open, it's color. It's also generally because of the mythology around the phoenix, it's it's grounded in peacocks, and so the face kind of looks peacockish with the little feathers here in the shape of the beak, in the shaped neck and the rising from the ashes. And so when we were designing it, we were thinking about how it can be representative of many cultures and how you can design it so it looks glorious when it's big, but also to your point, legible when it's at twelve
point size in your Google doc. Right, Yeah, you have to design it in a way where just like any letter form, like the letter A, you want to make sure that hole in the letter A is big enough to be legible. And so you do that with the shape. So the shape of the neck has enough space between the wings so that you can separate the different anatomical parts of the bird. So you're constantly looking at it
big and small. You're looking at it in dark environments and in light environments, because now we've got dark mode, we got light mode, we got all kinds of different modes, and so all you could because you can anticipate where emoji will appear because they appear everywhere. They're just they're all like smart refrigerators. Now I saw one etm at target, Like they're everywhere. All you can really do is just say, like itself, it's the best it possibly can be, and
where it's most frequently appearing. When designing the emoji, we obviously read the proposal, or if you're writing the proposal, is making sure it's grounded and the right literature, and you confer with experts on the subject as a designer, which is my favorite part of the job. You know, like the anatomical heart emoji was added and talked to
a cardiovascular surgeon. When we were redesigning some of our marine animals, we talked to the Monoey Bay Aquarium, you know, so like I get these excuses to talk to these folks that really know the space really well and figuring out that fine line between like, you know, you don't need to design something that would go in anatomy textbook for a surgeon to reference something that is legible and
useful and approachable and not terribly gory. That's where the third step I didn't really mention the first and second, but you know, it's like reading a proposal is really anticipating its purpose in a communication context, and so sometimes that means like not embracing reality, right, it means like
absolutely what how will it be visually represented? And then one part that I don't think the average designer who's proposing emoji, but I do think folks who are designing emoji fonts do consider is how it works with other
emoji in the inventory. You know, there's a new lime emoji coming, Like, how do you make sure that it's not just it's distinctive visually distinctive from the lemon emoji, And so you really want to evaluate and consider its purpose in a communication context and evaluate how it works with other emojis in the inventory. And then of course another aspect of designing emoji is anticipating how other folks will design it. Because it's a font, it's not a picture.
When I send it to you, I want to make sure that you're going to see something meaningfully similar as to what I think. And so there isn't much room for creative freedom, honestly, right, you really have to be faithful to the original intent and it's purpose and the proposal and.
Yeah, and what about the actual nuts and bolts of drawing it. I always picture those old like you know, animation studios from the twenties where they've got sketches of you know, characters we're now really familiar with. Where does it start in terms of the shape of it?
I mean it can.
Start from anywhere.
I mean.
One of our artists, Fiona, she was drawing the jellyfish emoji.
But by the way, the medusologists are thrilled about that, so thrilled.
We were working with a number of different students studying marine biology and they looked at all the different types of jellyfish and which one because you got to pick one? Yeah, which one is going to represent all of it? Isn't a box jellyfish?
Is that?
I forget the other one home jellyfish? Yeah, there's so yeah.
More, you know what you got here? Right, So you really go into cartoon land and you pick something that is sort of this idea of a jellyfish rather than literal jellyfish. Anyways, she did a number of sketches around different types, different colors, different ways it could swim, and at the end of the day, you know, you go with something that feels it is emblematic and iconic, and I mean the software is not the most interesting. You know, you pro create an illustrator, but then that's just the
first part. You have to make a font out of it, and then there's all kinds of font software as well.
Do you remember a controversy with a squid?
No? Oh, vaguely, but refresh me is there anything?
It had a butt on its face and the person who pointed that out was a friend of mine who I met because I interviewed her for the Touthology episode, and she was one of the ones that was like, excuse me, I'm a squid expert, and that squid has a butt on its face.
Yes, I do recall this now. And this sort of thing happens, and often it was then me often going to companies like Apple or Google and saying, hey, someone's brought this.
Up, someone named Sarah mcinaty.
What are you going to do about it? And often you wouldn't hear back necessarily, but you may. You may get a heads up when it gets updated to go oh, by the way, you might want to check or not.
You know. In the end, we just got to the point where we just checked every update religiously, so it didn't matter, you know what emojipedia, a new Apple update would come out, Google or anything, and we would downloaded and check side by side because maybe they released on them they didn't want to tell you about it, you know, maybe it was a bit on the downloaded. The bagel people didn't like the dry bagel with no cream cheese that Apple tried to release. I get that they briefly
tried to make the Peachless luscious. It was how dare and people got.
Mad, so yeah, how dare?
Yeah, those are fun discussions.
When you're working with Unicode, when there's a discussion about what's coming up next? Are there any emoji that are on the chopping block, like no one uses the fire hydrant, like get it out of here, anything like that that you have had to stand up for an emoji or or say no, not that one.
I mean, I try to kind of host conversations about it so to give people space to explore and ask questions.
Some of it rhetorical, some of it grounded in actual evidence, and I try not to step in unless there needs to be something that is fact fact based or clarifying or a follow up question of some sort, and to hold ourselves accountable to our own guidelines, right, Like, if we're starting to have a discussion about something that seems to undermine a previous one or contradict something, then try to bring that up and make sure that's surfaced and
appropriately addressed. Because once you add an emoji, you can never remove it.
Right.
They're permanent. They're permanent, so there's no room for experimentation, right. It is in the Unicode standard. It is a code point and they never remove the code point.
Wow. Can I ask you some questions for listeners?
Yes, love a listener questions. Okay, now to the people.
We have so many good ones. It is boggling, so ask smart people, colorful questions. Get ready to celebrate World Emoji Day on July seventeenth. Get pumped about it. We'll have another episode with all of your questions next week. Feel free to show this to anyone who has so many boggling emoji questions. It's part of our everyday life. I want to thank the guests who came on. We've linked all of their socials in the show notes. Thank
you Keith, Jeremy, Jennifer. We'll hear more from them next week. We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Ali ward with just one L on both. Also on TikTok at Ali underscore Ologies. Thank you to everyone talking about us on Reddit. Thanks to everyone who shares the show with friends. Thanks also to people at patreon dot com slash Ologies who contribute to the show. You can also contribute your quest questions and hear what episodes we have coming up soon. Ology's merch can be found at
ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for managing that and so so much more. Thank you Aaron Talbert for admitting the ologies podcast Facebook group. Emily White of the word to remakes our professional transcripts and you can find that and bleeped episodes up at aliward dot com slash ologies dash extras. Also, we have smologies available at aliwar dot com slash Smologies. They're linked in the show notes.
Those are shorter, kid friendly episodes you can listen to in a classroom or with your Mimasmologies is worked on by Ziegrodriguez Thomas, and Mercedes Maitland as well as Jarret Sleeper of Mindjmmdia Kelly R. Dwyer works on aliwar dot com now while Dilworth does our scheduling additional editing what's done by Mark David Christensen. Mercedes Maitland and Jarrett Sleeper took the lead as lead editors on this and did an amazing job, especially since I've been traveling the last
few weeks. Love you all to bits. Also, Lauren McCall did additional research for this. So big thanks to them for so much heavy lifting on such a big episode. We'll be back next week with part two. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music, And if you stick around to the episode, I'll tell you a secret. And this week's secret is that I was just going to open my phone to tell you what my most used emochias and I realized that my phone is dead. It's
only two in the afternoon. Why is my phone dead already? So I'm at like four goblins. But that's fine. You're just gonna have to wait until next week to find out. Also, when I was on Catalina Island last week teaching those climate scientists about Sidcom who are lovely, I missed a spot on my face on my upper forehead to hairline where I did not use enough sunscreen snorkeling, and now it is peeling. And so let this be a note
to cuppings Textra Crush, We're all gonna die. And also, bangs do offer sun protected so don't let's not forget that. But you do whatever you like. That's the whole point. Do whatever you like. Okay, Textra Crush, if you want, ask them what their favorite emojias. Okay, bye bye,