Talk About .... EMOJIs - Talk About Talk

This week we talk emojis ! ?

I hope you had a great week! Two questions for you, based on last week’s Podcast and blog on “FONTS“:

What is your favourite font?
Have you adjusted what fonts you are using?

(You can skim this short email or dive in to the many links to learn more!)

?All About EMOJIs

In last week’s podcast, Patrick Griffin, the FONT GUY, mentioned EMOJIs a few times. We can’t talk fonts without mentioning emojis, can we? Did you know?

WAY BACK in 1982, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Scott Fahlman proposed the following character sequence as a joke marker: 🙂 He later said of Emojis: “I think they are ugly, and they ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express emotions using standard keyboard characters. But perhaps that’s just because I invented the other kind.”
15 years later, in 1997, Emojis appeared on Japanese mobile phones. The word EMOJI comes from the Japanese e (絵, “picture”) + moji (文字, “character”)
Yes, there is an Emoji Dictionary: https://emojipedia.org/

? EMOJI CONTROVERSIES

OK – let’s do this. Race, violence and sex.

First up: RACE:

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Five(+) different skin colours are now available for many human emojis (including these redheads!), based on the Fitzpatrick scale for classifying human skin colour. Human emoji that do not conform to one of these races are now shown as non-human bright yellow, blue, or grey.

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The revolver, bomb and knife emojis have resulted in numerous arrests. In 2016, Apple changed its pistol emoji to a water pistol.

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Who knew that healthy fruits are the sexy emojis? Here is what you need to know: be careful with your eggplants and your peaches. Eggplants have surpassed bananas as the most phallic food. And < 7% of tweets with the peach emoji refer to the actual fruit.

You’re welcome.

??‍♂️The Unicode Consortium

Have you ever searched for an emoji, but had trouble finding the one that represents what you are trying to communicate?

Well, maybe you should submit a proposal to the Unicode Consortium!

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Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? The Unicode Consortium is a “non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards which specify the representation of text in modern software products and other standards.”

(PHEW)

The Unicode Consortium also governs emojis. And they were mentioned a few times in the FONT podcast with Patrick Griffin...

Here is an interesting list of Emoji Proposals submitted to the Unicode Consortium. My favourite contender? “two people hugging.”

(Or is that two ALIENS hugging?!?)

If you haven’t already listened to it, I hope you enjoy this week’s podcast on Fonts, Typography & Emojis.

Sneak peek: here is what “the font guy” Patrick Griffin told me when I asked him about emojis:

Coming up next week: a VERY important topic. One that I hope will help you immensely when it counts the most –How to support your grieving friends.

I interviewed an incredibly gracious and compassionate grief counsellor who has some valuable advice about what to say and do when you are supporting a grieving friend. Look out for that podcast coming next week!If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the podcast here and sign up for the email blog here. And please share the good word – forward this email to your friends who might also be interested in Talk About Talk. We can all use some knowledge and strategies to help us become more confident communicators, right?

THANK YOU!

Talk soon!