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Welcome to the all-time least popular episode of Half as Interesting.
So say you want to make an emoji, a new one.
I don’t, but I wanted to make a video so I talked to a guy.
“My name is Jeremy Burge.
I’m the founder of Emojipedia and the vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji subcommittee.”
(0:09) Jeremy’s Wikipedia page says he’s a “widely-regarded expert” on emojis while
my Wikipedia page says… nothing since I don’t have one so I guess he’s cooler
than me.
Being an Emoji expert means you know things like, “The ROFL emoji is rising every year.
So that’s the laughing crying on its side, that’s on the up.”
(23:24) Just like all fun technologies, Emojis originated
in Japan.
But originally, “They only worked on one type of phone and one type of phone network
and then all the other networks wanted to get on board and they just didn’t work very
well across platforms.”
(1:10) Emojis quickly rose in popularity, but there was no one standard.
“What could happen is you could send a picture of a boy or a girl and on the other end it
could end up a piece of cake or a piece of sushi.”
(3:45) It was chaos.
Essentially, when one phone sends an emoji, it doesn’t send the actual image of an emoji,
it sends a code that corresponds to the image and so if one phone’s codes were different
than another’s, the wrong emoji could appear, but then the Unicode Consortium stepped in.
Their primary purpose is to make sure that all 136,755 characters in their standard can
be seen across every single computer and phone in the world.
Nowadays, however, 2,666 of those characters are emojis.
“So anyone can submit a proposal for an emoji to the Unicode consortium.
They’ve got a bunch of criteria to make sure that it’s going to meet the minimum
bar, as such.
You want to prove, to start with, that it doesn’t already exist.”
(5:40) In addition, in a submission you have to prove that the proposed emoji will be frequently
used, is a distinct image that can be identified at the small size, is needed to fill a gap
in the emoji alphabet, is frequently requested, and is able to be shown visually.
A “I just forgot the name of a casual acquaintance I’ve known for years and called them ‘bud’”
emoji likely would not get accepted since it’s just too abstract.
There are also certain factors that will disqualify a candidate emoji.
For example, Unicode generally denies emojis that are too specific.
A “I went on StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson and now realize I have a resting nervous
face,” emoji would likely get denied for this reason.
For the same reason, they won’t approve submissions for specific people, brands, or
locations.
There are, though, actually some existing emojis that violate this rule since some emojis
made it in only because they existed pre-Unicode.
For example, this Emoji exists of a statue outside Shibuya Station in Tokyo even though
an emoji of such a specific location would never be approved nowadays.
All those different criteria are addressed and compiled into a submission report by whoever
is proposing the emoji and then this is then sent to Unicode.
That’s where Jeremy gets involved.
“I’m the vice-chair of the subcommittee which sounds more exciting than it is, to
be honest.
It’s mostly an initial vetting on proposals that come in to make sure they’re in good
order before they get taken to the real decision makers which is the technical committee meeting.”
(9:35) Essentially, the emoji subcommittee just decides whether a submission fulfills
the criteria.
“Once it’s approved that it at least meets the minimum criteria it goes to what’s called
the Unicode technical committee and each company that’s involved with Emojis such as Apple
or Google or Microsoft—they get a vote and if a decision needs to be made they can each
vote individually for an emoji or any text character to be approved.”
(6:50) The majority of the committee’s time is actually spent on non-emoji matters making
decisions about how other characters should be encoded but with how frequently these emojis
are used, these are very important decisions.
Still today though, each company designs how emojis look for their respective devices.
Emojis are supposed to more or less look the same across platforms, but sometimes they
don’t.
“There was an emoji, the eye roll emoji that’s meant to be, sort of, uhhh, but,
for whatever reason on Samsung phones it looked really happy so a Samsung user could send
you what they thought was a happy face and they’d say, ‘hey do you want to catch
up later on, happy face’ and then you’d get a message that says, ‘hey do you want
to catch up later on, uhhh.’” (5:08) In an ideal world the standardization of emojis
would extend to their actual design, but right now that’s impossible since emojis are copyrighted
by their respective designers.
That also means that pretty much every single piece of emoji clothing or merchandise you’ve
ever seen was illegal including the shirt that Jeremy was wearing during this interview.
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