I've included a very small subset of emoji (not color) once. Things like simple smiley faces and other icons that feel better with a code point assigned.
This is partly because of the technical issue: most emoji require or at least benefit from color. No single color font format is very well-supported. OpenType has embraced three of the formats. Although it can be fun to play with, if the “main point” is a normal font that does not need color, adding emoji and dealing with all the variant formats is a significant added hassle.
Not saying this won't be a routine thing some day. But not yet.
I've done a standalone emoji font but as for adding emoji to a font, I think there's little point. I think you have to go all the way and do the full set. However, the emoji codepoints are handy. If you're already going to include a pile
Emoji fonts are fonts too! It depends on what you mean by ‘include emoji’. Fonts have included various pictographic characters since the beginning of type. Some of the most common Unicode characters can take emoji presentation* and as such can be considered ‘emoji characters’. But if you qualify emoji as being colored glyphs, this narrows the field considerably. In this case, it may be fun to include a handful of emoji glyphs in fonts once the tooling makes it easy to and the platform/application support makes it sensible to. In the future, I think that color emoji fonts will proliferate much like text fonts do today and will be usable in all the same ways that text fonts currently are.
(An emoji-laced tirade was thoughtfully and carefully written, only to be ignored upon posting, and deleted by this forum software, or some anti-emoji agent of THRUSH.)
I'm not planning to add Emonji, but I'm considering including a small set of icons.
According to http://www.fontreach.com/#top some of the most popular fonts are iconfonts (FontAwesome, Glyphicons, Genericons), so it seems that there is a huge demand for it.
A long time ago while researching emoticons, i came across these "moonies". although i know that this is not the question, asked in this thread — but i though it'd be interesting to share that even back in 1907, someone was designing and selling something very similar to the emojis of today.
Comments
This is partly because of the technical issue: most emoji require or at least benefit from color. No single color font format is very well-supported. OpenType has embraced three of the formats. Although it can be fun to play with, if the “main point” is a normal font that does not need color, adding emoji and dealing with all the variant formats is a significant added hassle.
Not saying this won't be a routine thing some day. But not yet.
However, the idea of doing a full set in a unique style sounds interesting.
* http://www.unicode.org/Public/emoji/1.0//emoji-data.txt
“Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji.”
The Creation
In the beginning God created heaven and earth
And the earth was without form and void
See more on carlsen.de.
According to http://www.fontreach.com/#top some of the most popular fonts are iconfonts (FontAwesome, Glyphicons, Genericons), so it seems that there is a huge demand for it.
Barnhart brothers & Spindler, 1907.
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019203291;view=1up;seq=709