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Google is tweaking 992 of its emoji designs to make them more “universal, accessible and authentic,” the company said today. The new designs will arrive this fall with Android 12, but Google says they will also be available on older versions with apps that use its Appcompat compatibility layer. They’re also coming to other Google platforms like Gmail, Chrome OS, Google Chat, and YouTube Live Chat this month.
None of the changes are particularly drastic. Instead, it’s mostly the types of tweaks that make the meaning of each emoji easier to understand at a glance by a wider range of people. The pie emoji, for example, currently looks like a classic American pumpkin pie. This is fine for Americans, but it means that in the UK the design looked more like a pie than a traditional pie. The new, more universal design should solve this problem.
In other cases, Google has made their designs look bolder and more over the top, which is helpful given their small size on most screens. The croissant and bacon emoji will now have more sparkle, while the scissors will have a more exaggerated edge. Vehicles like cars and taxis have also had their proportions adjusted to make them more eye-catching.
Finally, the bikini emoji no longer appears to be worn by an invisible person, and the face mask emoji now shows a face with open eyes. Google says it made the change to reflect the fact that masks have become “a universal way to show kindness to others” rather than a symbol of a person’s illness.
It’s not unusual for businesses to redesign their emoji in this way, either to correct inaccuracies or to reflect changing cultural assumptions about how they’re used. Apple last year made a similar adjustment to its own mask emoji to show a smiley face under the mask, and it also changed its syringe emoji to make it more appropriate as a symbol for vaccines. In 2019, he even updated his abacus emoji after people reported issues with his old design. And let’s not forget Google’s redesigns of its burger and beer emoji in response to an outcry in 2017.
If you’re wondering why we’ve seen such a flurry of emoji news over the past couple of days, it’s because this year’s World Emoji Day is coming tomorrow, July 17th. Yesterday we saw the announcement of the finalists for this year’s new emoji bundle, Facebook announced new emoji with sound for its Messenger service, and even Microsoft jumped in with a new set of emoji. 3D on Windows, Office, Microsoft Teams, and more.
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