Why we have a ginger emoji

I n November 2014, a tech-industry consortium announced a new set of emoji that would diversify the physical appearance of pictograms.

"I checked and I saw that redheads were not there" Emma Kelly, publisher and founder of the Ginger Parrot website. "I was wondering, no one has raised this issue, is there no one in Apple with red hair? … Everyone has forgotten Ed Sheeran?"

Kelly posted a post on his blog, started a petition on change. org and cited citations to The Guardian and other media. But she quickly discovered that it would take much more than a simple online protest to clear a path.

Emoji are subject to a complex technical bureaucracy. The type and number of new pictograms published each year are strictly controlled by the Unicode Consortium, an international nonprofit organization grouping companies, including representatives from Apple, Google, Microsoft and Adobe . The main mission of Unicode is to convert the alphabets and symbols of the world into code that all smartphones, desktops, laptops and computers can read. The dollar sign, no matter the phone or the font, is U + 0024. The taco: U + 1F32E. Web sites, email clients, word processors and other interfaces then turn that code into words and icons, and vice versa.

Unicode is interested in simple characters – musical and mathematical notations, currency signs, punctuation marks. About ten years ago, this group of accomplished linguists, font designers and software developers began to include smileys that had become popular in several Japanese telecom companies. Subsequently, these technical suzerains were instructed to debate issues such as the prevalence of unicorns and the cultural import of a pile of poo. A deeper look at Kelly's campaign for ginger performance reveals that they do not accept their responsibility cheerfully.

Chapter One

Adopting Pixelated Kindness

Emoji began in 1999 in Japan, a country with a long history of pictographic language. In 2007, Unicode members began to seriously debate how to include stylized image characters to facilitate their exchange between platforms. In 2010, the updated Unicode Standard, version 6.0, had about 722 emoji

Michael Everson, linguist ; The Irish national representative at the International Organization for Standardization, which helps develop Unicode : Emoji were originally those little pixelated images that people could send with their text messages in order to increase with kindness. Many people thought that all this was, shall we say, unsuitable for encoding.

Doug Ewell, Emeritus Member, Unicode Consortium : Will people send each other face-palm emoji in 10 or 20 years? It's like encoding a shag rug

Everson: We said, OK, if that needs to be done, it's to be done.

Ewell: What did Unicode finish? to do was to add these emoji to the standard so that it would be possible to trade them as if they were characters.

Paul Hunt, designer of fonts and fonts, Adobe Systems; member of the emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium : For your computer, it is exactly the same as a letter A or a Greek Alpha. Your computer sees a code that matches a particular concept. For alphabets and other writing systems, the code corresponds to the letters. For emoji, it corresponds to a particular small image.

Everson: We added a whole bunch of emoji and moved on to something else. Nobody knew what was going to happen

Ewell: We assumed that it would not go out of control and, over the years, he did it.

Fred Benenson, author of Emoji Dick, a version of the novel translated into emoji : The integration of emoji in Unicode has transformed them into an easy standard to implement for hardware vendors. Before that, it was just that mess of glyphs – things like hearts, arrows and faces of cats.

Jennifer 8. Lee, co-founder, Emojination, a diversity advocacy group; Vice President, Unicode Consortium emoji subcommittee : The fact that they are not infinitely variable, that there is a very controlled whole, makes them a common vocabulary between people and cultures.

Jennifer Daniel, Art Director for Google emoji, Google : In the beginning, people used them as names. Now they are used more like a punctuation to indicate the intention, the way an exclamation point signals enthusiasm. Emoji allows people to text their way of speaking, with tone and emotion.

Chapter Two

Diversifying the Emojiverse

Each year, Unicode approves more emoji, but the organization does not determine their final appearance. It depends on providers such as Apple and Google. As these companies began to make their versions, the expectations of users changed

Marcel Danesi, Linguist Anthropologist, University of Toronto : Early emoji removed the questions of gender, race, and class completely. They were abstract symbols devoid of all these connotations.

Everson: When Apple released an iOS version with emoji in 2011, everyone thought it was cute and fun. Except that Apple had messed up the skin color because they had not made all the people blue smurfs or yellow Simpsons. They made white

Danesi: If you use a lot, one day you will say, I'm tired of using the basic yellow smiley. It does not reflect my own skin.

Daniel: People do not want to go to the emoji keyboard and not recognize themselves.

Everson: I proposed a corrects the fact that if we needed five emoji grandfather, simply codify five emoji grandfather. What Unicode did eventually was to encode five skin patches that pertain to Fitzpatrick's skin scale

Thomas B. Fitzpatrick, Dermatologist (1919- 2003), "The validity and practicality of sun-reactive skin types I to VI" : A simple work classification was proposed, based not on the color of the hair or eyes, but on that Patients Saying Their Responses to Initial Sun Exposure

Unicode Technical Standard # 51: Five Symbol-Modifying Fonts Providing a Range of Skin Tones for Human Emoji have been Released in Unicode Version 8.0 . ( Editor's note: The two most beautiful tones of Fitzpatrick, I and II, share a modifier. )] Edo-11 emoji modifier: a character that can be used to change the appearance from a previous emoji in an emoji –

Hunt: These things happen below the level of user interaction. The user simply uses his emoji keyboard, and he will spit out the corresponding Unicode sequence for "princess with a medium complexion" or "runner woman with a dark complexion."

Everson: This was a way to divide this thing reasonably. There was a problem and Unicode fixed it. It works, and people seem to be happy to use it.

Chapter Three

Awesome, but what about hair?

With the release of version 8.0 in June 2015, Kelly and other redheads ranted. The modern family actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson tweeted his disappointment, and comedian Scott "Carrot Top" Thompson wrote a thought piece for Time. With respect to Unicode, the dyeing work was not part of their job description.

UTS # 51: It is irrelevant for Unicode to provide a mechanism based on encoding to represent all aspects of the diversity of the I & # 39; human appearance that emoji users might want to indicate …. No particular hair color is required; however, dark hair is generally considered more neutral because people of all skin tones may have black (or very brown) hair.

Kelly: I was pretty angry at that time. created a petition change.org . Finally, we collected more than 20,000 signatures. Unicode first of all said that what these images looked like did not really depend on them, that it was up to Apple and Google and others to do it

Daniel: There are differences in the way they are rendered. Apple's emoji are highly rendered and realistic. Google are more illustrative and fun. Circles, for example, are not perfect circles. They are a little spongy and sweet. But this softness helps because it makes the illustrations more user-friendly.

Kelly: We wanted to physically go there. We made a call for redheads. A group of them went to Apple's headquarters and delivered the signatures on a carrot-shaped USB stick.

Apple Inc.: N' did not respond to several requests for comments.

Kelly: Of course, because Apple is Apple, we have not heard anything from them. Someone found it somewhere out there.

Daniel: In the end, sellers like Google are at the mercy of what Unicode does and fails. The amount of emoji added each year, and that is added, is really up to them.

Lee: We want to increase it slowly rather than throwing it all at the same time. Fifty to 70 per year is a good target

Hunt: The process begins with a proposition. If you want a new emoji to conform to the Unicode standard so that everyone can use it, you have to create a report. Unicode provides a template, which is on its website.

Benenson: I think it's kind of a bar for people who care about submitting emoji that shows that they're thinking about whether it really should to be emoji. The addition of this little process helps to eliminate the foolish people

Lee: It's really not that difficult to create a good proposal. If you did reasonably well in high school, you could understand that.

Benenson: If it's a food emoji like the oyster, you have to take screenshots of Google's search results on the oyster by compared to the hamburger to show that it's popular

Kelly: I thought it was crazy to have to make a proposal. It was so obvious that the ginger emoji should be there. So, as a form of protest, I refused to make the proposal.

Lee: It is not as if the emoji subcommittee was rejecting proposals in a back-and-forth fashion.

Everson: The committee removed the pile of shredded poop as a candidate. I made a lot of noise about it. Promoters cited reasons such as: "We need it because if you had digestive problems and wanted to text your proctologist." Can not you use words? Do you need to send a photo to your doctor? What's wrong with you?