Standard set of emoticons

Nick Shinn

Suppose one were to include a set of emoticons in one’s normal fonts.
Which would they be?
As a starter, no doubt, versions of these Facebook “Like” icons.

JoyceKetterer

I think that the tongue sticking out is crucial

Peter Constable

Each person will have their own idea of what are essential. If your font is for a particular client, it makes sense to discuss with them. If you're targeting a general, broad audience, then usage data for a broad audience is probably helpful.

Here's one data source you can refer to: http://www.emojitracker.com/.

Note: when you hover over an item, it will show the Unicode character name. Don't be misled by how colours are handled in names. For example, HEAVY BLACK HEART sounds very gloomy, but in this context "heavy" refers to the size, and "black" means that the fill is the same colour as the outline (i.e., entirely black in B/W printing). As a full-colour emoji, this should be displayed red.


Looking at the top items in emojitracker, I would consolidate similar items. E.g., HEAVY BLACK HEART, BLACK HEART SUIT and maybe also TWO HEARTS.

Nick Shinn

I dunno Joyce, I’ve seen that emoticon, and it’s a bit ambiguous—more delight than derision, but possibly both—and not very often used, perhaps for that reason.

Actually, I’m quite serious about this, the idea occurred to me during the How to best give access to special characters in a font thread.

Nick Shinn

Here is a top ten.

That seems to be a reasonable number.

JoyceKetterer

@Nick Shinn  I understood that you were being serious.  I also agree that the tongue sticking out isn't used often, and that the reason is because it's ambiguous as currently drawn.  My counter argument would be that it was one of the first people used - before we had these faces it could be made using punctuation - and it feels foundational to me.  That might just be my age talking.

Andreas Stötzner

I have also been thinking about this. A while ago I reviewed the usual average set of typographic characters and I decided to put a basic set of additional ideographic characters in my new font(s). Though I would not confine this consideration to emoji alone. Further supplements contain a few geometric characters and ornamental glyphs which also may enhance the possibilities a font gives to the user.

Nick Shinn

The great thing about adding these “sorts” to one’s fonts is that one can use the same glyphs over and over again! 

Just like the days of metal.

Nathan Zimet

@Andreas Stötzner Hi just curious what do you encode your angle brackets as? There's quite a few choices in unicode.

Personally I only use emoji in texting friends or on twitter. I don't think I would add more than smile and frown to a normal font. I do agree adding other symbols and arrows is useful though, especially in fonts that can be used for signage. 

Sérgio Martins

I tend to agree with Joyce here, not just because of historic reasons (the :P has been around for a long time), but because my empirical anecdotal evidence leads to believe it's not that underused.

For a general, wide net, approach, going with the most used seems to be reasonable.

That said, wouldn't this depend on what you call a "normal font", as the expected usage of the file should have some bearing on the necessity/support of the emoji?

I'd expect a dictionary typeface to cover emoji, much like a typeface designed (and its font(s) built) for a web messaging environment. On the other hand, if you want a general purpose workhorse that does everything just well enough, unless you expect the emoji to be printed, why would you include these? If the typeface is to be used on screen, there's not need for it to have emoji, as those can just as easily be fetched from another, dedicated, font (and with colour to boot).

There's also the factor that black and white emoji visually behave very differently from colour ones, with this being an interesting evolution of the symbols: from punctuation to represent stylised facial expressions, to pantomiming colour versions (which need a black and white fallback, iirc), back to flattened expression.

Adam Jagosz

From that top ten link above, I think "Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes" is a bad idea — on my system (Segoe UI Emoji) it is terribly inconsistent with the suggested name:

Nothing more than a "smiling face with closed eyes", or maybe at most, "tired smiling face". So I suspect it has a different tone in each emoji font — such ambiguous emojis should be steered clear of.

Edit: Somebody who put that page together did a really bad job: the above is actually Relieved face emoji. This is the actual Smiling face with smiling eyes (also Segoe UI Emoji):

Adam Jagosz

🙃 ¿Would the Upside Down Smile Emoji have much use in Spanish? 🙂

Nick Shinn

Good points about the emoticon use, Sérgio.

So, there is no practical purpose in having a standard set of emoticons in a non-specialist typeface?

Nonetheless, matching type style is possible for emoticons, a little. Anyway, I gave Happy Face a squircle shape in my superellipse type Richler, although in retrospect I should have gone much further and drawn it with a lot more detail in a contrasting stroke width style, more decorative ornament than infographic icon.

**

For general ornaments, the idea is to render them in the style of the typeface.
Dwiggins’ Caravan (1938), a companion to Electra, is a classic example of that.

In my Duffy Script, the casually drawn Heart and Star seemed appropriate to the type style.

***

I was puzzled about how to encode the arrow in Scotch Modern.

Giving it an elaborate rendering and feathers seemed apropos for this type style, yet there is a specific code point for “Feathered Arrow”, which is not the default.

In fact, Unicode has 28 different right-pointing arrows! That’s a bizarre foray into style, kind of like having different code points for the character A depending on whether it is Light, Bold, Sans, Serif, Slab, condensed, whatever.  

Johannes Neumeier

Playing devil's advocate here: While it is nice to have emojis in the font's tone, is that what users expect and want when typing an emoji?

I don't think users think of emojis as part of fonts, but as images. While there is probably some acceptance or at least awareness that emojis look different in different operating systems or apps, I would reckon a user would be ill surprised if they typeset something in a font's emoji specifically, then paste this to someone, say in a messenger app, and the emoji ends up looking entirely different.

Adam Jagosz

Nick Shinn said:

In fact, Unicode has 28 different right-pointing arrows! That’s a bizarre foray into style, kind of like having different code points for the character A depending on whether it is Light, Bold, Sans, Serif, Slab, condensed, whatever.  

Maybe not Light, Slab, or Condensed (unless you count halfwidth Romaji) but in fact, we've got Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, their Sans-Serif versions, Monospace, Script, Fraktur, Double-Struck, and even Bold Fraktur encoded (in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block). Thanks to this, all the cool kids can type bold italic on social media using an online generator.

Adam Jagosz

I don't think typesetting something in a custom font only to paste it as text in a messaging app is a common workflow. (I'm probably wrong.)

Nick Shinn

Johannes:

Playing devil's advocate here: While it is nice to have emojis in the font's tone, is that what users expect and want when typing an emoji?

You never know how things will turn out once they get put in play.

The Euro symbol was originally planned as immutable (like ℮), but was quickly put through the wringer by type designers.

This discussion has given me the idea of producing some typographic emojis that look quite different than the usual fare, matching their rendering to the style of each font. That is, after all, a traditional typographic practice with ornaments, if not the traditional typographic practice.

JoyceKetterer

@Nick Shinn I totally want to have my team do that, but they already have soooo much to do.

Andreas Stötzner

Nick Shinn said:

… the idea of producing some typographic emojis that look quite different than the usual fare, matching their rendering to the style of each font.  …

I have done this with some of my fonts. It is very pleasing work.

K Pease

I have thought about the idea that newspapers could use a reasonably comprehensive black and white emoji font that goes well with serif text and looks good in print, for quoting tweets in the news. Then I think that this would be very little benefit for a lot of work drawing random animals and objects, and also, who's reading print newspapers?

John Nolan

Nick Shinn said:

This discussion has given me the idea of producing some typographic emojis that look quite different than the usual fare, matching their rendering to the style of each font. That is, after all, a traditional typographic practice with ornaments, if not the traditional typographic practice.

This, I think, is a great idea...they would be a lot of fun to use. "Victorian emojis" would be a hoot to use with Scotch Modern...maybe Punch Magazine styled?

John Hudson

See also Bianca Berning’s Emoji Ambivalence.

Nick Shinn

John Nolan

Nice!