Designing emoji for the way we communicate today

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/world-emoji-day-noto-3d/

by pentagrama • 5 days ago

72 98 5 days ago

xd1936• 5 days ago

Does anyone know _where_ these supposed 4,000 OBJ files are open-sourced? They don't seem to be in the Noto Emoji GitHub repo, nor linked anywhere in the article.

xfalcox• 5 days ago

I'm wondering the same! How that article has no links is beyond me.

paularmstrong• 5 days ago

I also like that the article uses whatever system emoji you have, so everything is just showing apple emoji in text for me. All I see are a few 3D video renders of theirs.

magicalist4• 5 days ago

I couldn't find anything easier.

Seems like they're trying to tease excitement for new emoji in the next Android release (there was also an earlier linkless post in May[1]), so I'm assuming they don't want anyone scooping them and will push to the Noto repo on or after the day of release.

Seems like the post really should at least have used a future tense for "handing over raw .OBJ files to the community".

[1] https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android...

andrepd• 5 days ago

Yeah, an AI generated blogpost telling me about human emotion...

nibbleyou• 5 days ago

I didn't find it to be AI-generated.

Rebelgecko• 5 days ago

(crying emoji) is a masterclass in modern vocabulary... seemed a bit suspect to me. Maybe people are just sadder

Chu4eeno• 5 days ago

It smells like Gemini to high heavens, how familiar are you with its writing? If nothing else because of the complete lack of relevant links.

dTal• 3 days ago

That's kind of terrifying. It's extremely obvious. Overwrought "punchy" style and riddled with not-x-but-x chatgpt-isms (all the LLMs have that now):

"We don't just "laugh" anymore. We collapse, or internally scream".

"They need a pulse and a soul — not the cold precision of industrial CAD models"

It's everywhere now and no one seems to notice. Sometimes I feel like the guy in They Live (1988) with the glasses.

smlacy• 5 days ago

Can we please just make emoji bigger onscreen? They're not even em-height most of the time. Most interfaces don't scale the emojis when scaling the text.

There's so much artistry and time & effort put into these, and they end up feeling l ike a yellow smudge behind a crack on a dim screen in my life.

IAmBroom• 5 days ago

It's also crap...

The way we use emoji has changed. In the early days, we were literal: You sent a nail polish emoji () because you were, in fact, getting your nails polished.

The early days of emojis used unpaired parentheses, colons, and semicolons. It's like claiming int the early days of Apple the company released macOS 10.

thunderfork• 5 days ago

I believe you're referring to emotions, which are a separate and distinct concept/term

CharlesW• 5 days ago

I believe the point is that emoticons/emoji/kaomoji were never literal, and that it's surprising that anyone whose job is communications-related would say this.

doublepg233• 5 days ago

The Google "blob" emoji was the peak of emoji design.

0110101001• 5 days ago

Getting rid of the blobs and putting a smiley face on 'pile of poo' were sad days.

smusamashah2• 5 days ago

I always found them bland. They are not distinctive enough, just like Google's icons.

doublepg233• 5 days ago

Covering my blob turtle's ears from hearing this heresy rn :(

fnoef• 5 days ago

OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis

bigyabai2• 5 days ago

Emojis are more of a unicode standard, they can be re-implemented with various themes to suit modern design trends. There's nothing wrong with redesigning your emojis to fit with the rest of your OS like you would with a system typeface.

Analemma_• 5 days ago

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Approximately nobody thought Google’s current emoji family needed a total overhaul, stop breaking our pattern recognition for no reason other than your designers are bored and don’t have enough real work to do.

ezst• 5 days ago

Except there's no way for the Unicode standard to be prescriptive enough for the different implementations to express identical intent. And that's before the politics get mixed in (e.g. Apple's water gun). That's why you see many chat services and social networks shipping their own whole and opinionated emoji font: at least on their platform every user sees the same glyph and although there is still room for interpretation and misunderstanding, that's not by having too many font designers.

sghiassy2• 5 days ago

We have Times New Roman! Stop designing new fonts!

ksymph• 5 days ago

The difference here is that new emojis replace older designs. If designing a new font meant Times New Roman could no longer be used, that would be a problem.

graypegg2• 5 days ago

They do have to keep drawing them as unicode assigns new codepoints. So they can't really be left alone, other than just leaving the old ones alone and only appending. But I would imagine this trend towards non-raster versions of emojis is more about making updates MUCH easier rather than "innovating emojis" (even if they claim that in their marketing slop)

So many of the newer code points are ZWJ patterns modifying existing emoji. If you already rigged the 3D shark emoji, when unicode decides that :shark: + ZWJ + :family of 3: has to resolve to :horrific shark attack involving a family of 3:, at least that's not too hard.

quentindanjou• 5 days ago

How can you cut so many budget of so many products and decide "yeah, emoji in 3d, that's what we are going to do!". I don't understand... Maybe they have some AR/VR future usage of some kind?

inigyou7• 5 days ago

Did you know that new emojis are added in every version of Unicode since it had emojis?

MDCore• 5 days ago

Modern internet culture has steadily moved from mild expressions to drama, hyperbole and overwhelm.

rofl

pbhjpbhj• 5 days ago

ROFLCOPTER!

summermusic• 5 days ago

The best emoji for the way we communicate today would be to revert the water pistol back to a real gun.

thih94• 5 days ago

True, then again, I’d prefer we revert the way we communicate today, thank you very much.

sph• 5 days ago

Glaring ‘omissions’ are also breasts and penis emojis. Maybe even one representing sexual intercourse. You’ll find they are quite central to human culture.

doublepg233• 5 days ago

There's a phallus in unicode but an emoji would be welcome. https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B8

ComputerGuru4• 5 days ago

It’s insane because it literally breaks everything published with the old emoji to date.

havefunbesafe• 5 days ago

Can we get the 3D-rendered emoji team to switch gears and work on making Drive's search function work >5% of queries?

graypegg2• 5 days ago

You already know this, but to say the obvious out loud: Google is certainly big enough that they can pay both a 3D-rendered emoji team and a Drive search team. Drive search is bad because the Drive search team isn't working on it, not because they're short staffed due to investment in the 3D-emoji team, who wouldn't work on gdrive even if they had nothing else to do.

tamimio• 5 days ago

Wasn’t google the one who made flat design popular after we had full 3D and glass aesthetics? Now they want to pretend they “invented” 3D shades emojis again..

hgoel• 5 days ago

I really wish they'd go back to the blobs and stick to them.

ChrisArchitect• 5 days ago

tip: on Gboard type the sparkle emoji and then any other emoji and it will suggest the blob version (tho, only as an image)

cryzinger• 5 days ago

You can also use Emoji Kitchen to generate the images if you use a non-Gboard keyboard! https://emojikitchen.dev/

awestroke• 5 days ago

oh, are they going to adjust the eggplant emoji to match modern usage? And perhaps the peach emoji as well?

jawns• 5 days ago

If so, I hope they never go from 3D to 4D.

thih94• 5 days ago

Overheated face emoji

BoppreH2• 5 days ago

Having read the article, I still don't understand the point of 3D modeling emoji. Even the user interviews didn't mention it, and problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.

I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms. There are still significant differences between Android and iOS, for example. They recognize how subtle emoji interpretation is, so the only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels.

magicalist4• 5 days ago

I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.

You can't really do this. Or, rather, it's already been done, but people choose not to do this.

Emoji are just unicode characters. How they're displayed depends on the font used. Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

The one announced here is open source, for instance, but there's no way Apple is going to adopt it as the system default.

BoppreH2• 5 days ago

You can't really do this.

"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user. We understand users might prefer the current designs, and we are proud of the work our team has done, but we believe that consistent communication is more important, and individual users can always enable the override to get the old look back."

Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.

internet20002• 5 days ago

I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.

This is a step in that direction. The entire industry has been consolidating around Apple's look. Take a look at the old Google, Samsung and Microsoft versions of Woman dancer for a trip https://emojipedia.org/woman-dancing#designs

skillina• 5 days ago

The only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels

Since switching to iPhone recently, I've been realizing that iMessage users are living in another world, and beginning to understand their emoji choices more. I assumed the double exclamation emoji was just some trend, but it turned out to be one of the preselected emoji for iMessage and I was just oblivious since I didn't use that software. Other notes include the "haha" emoji instead of the "tears of joy" and pink hearts instead of red.

There's no way to standardize this. People communicate in different ways. The whole point of emoji is to be creative. If there's one singular "correct" way to use an emoji then creativity is dead.

why_at• 5 days ago

problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.

I think this is the funniest sentence I've ever read on Hackernews.

What are we doing with our lives?

warumdarum2• 4 days ago

Always look on the smile side of janus

inigyou7• 5 days ago

It must be for metaverse projects so that you can walk around to the back of a chat message.

warumdarum2• 4 days ago

You can now add a excellent emoji to a thumbs up emojii and do a market penetration animation

guluarte• 5 days ago

cool, meanwhile people will use pixelated pepes instead

xnx2• 5 days ago

Would love to see a Google Trends-type dashboard based on Google's "Gboard Federated Analytics" data.

I don't think the data at https://www.emojitracker.com/ is as valid or as frequently updated.

cyberax• 5 days ago

What a slopfest. The floating plague in full swing: https://imgur.com/a/IIRIrMI

I just love the "efety Updates" and Android 1.

jaredsohn• 5 days ago

In today's AI times, I find it a little amusing to think about emojis as an automation of the craft of making ascii art. Is a little different since people don't get paid for that, but there was a creative component to it.

tacone• 5 days ago

charcircuit2• 5 days ago

In the early days, we were literal

People using smiling and laughing emoji were not literally smiling and laughing no more than the people writing LOL.

We’re handing over raw .OBJ files to the community so they can use them to build immersive VR worlds, indie apps or weird memes.

Where?

thih94• 5 days ago

No, the point was that we were literal when choosing which emoji to use.

charcircuit2• 5 days ago

That's not what the article is saying from my reading of it. It thinks "rolling on the floor laughing" is a new exaggerated phenomenon despite ROFL being used the same way for decades.

ollin• 5 days ago

This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much.

This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B slider vs the old versions. Overall the new design looks like a fairly tasteful compromise between Google's previous flat-shaded vector emoji and the hybrid 2d+3d Apple emoji, with the benefits (easier to rerender with higher-resolution, animations, tweaked lighting, etc.) that you'd get from a fully-3D pipeline. So I like the new set of emoji, just not this particular blog.google.com article.

magicalist4• 5 days ago

Yeah, looks like that article was from an I/O announcement of these new emoji (which I don't remember, but I also didn't watch much of the keynote), and they've decided to tease this until it finally lands in the next version of android.

What's the overlap of people excited about new emoji and also read blog.google? OTOH, I guess they didn't ask to be posted to HN. :shrug:

echoangle• 5 days ago

When will people learn that old/new comparisons should go left to right for people that read left to right?

ButlerianJihad• 5 days ago

Personally, I read English in the boustophedron style. Sometimes it's the only way to unlock those Satanic back-masked messages!

rcxdude• 5 days ago

more confusingly, it swaps direction between the wipe comparison and the side-by-side just below it!

ComputerGuru4• 5 days ago

Why did the cat get an evil smirk? It seems like adding rain to the umbrella potentially breaks the existing meaning? What’s the emoji that went from three colored circles on a stick to three completely ambiguous widgets?

starshadowx2• 5 days ago

You have the order of which are the old ones and which are replacements backwards. The "three coloured circles on a stick" are dango, that before/after is actually a mistake as the before one is the oden emoji, not the dango emoji. The smirking cat one is also a different emoji than the normal cat one, so there will be new versions of both.

xg153• 5 days ago

Thanks! That other link was much more informative.

I think it's a bit annoying that for some emoji, they still change the content and not just the style.

It's not as bad as the "gun/watergun controversy", but I think especially that cat emoji could lead to messages being interpreted differently, depending which version of the emoji you see.

The corporate link in the OP was gushing endlessly about the sophisticated ways to communicate emotions that are ostensibly enabled by emoji, so shouldn't then companies at least make sure the emojis consistently show the same thing?

cosmicriver• 4 days ago

Cat smiling and cat smirking are two separate emoji. Why the article depicted them as before-and-after is a mystery.

xnx2• 5 days ago

The pendulum between iconographic and photorealistic will swing back and forth for eternity.

arecsu• 5 days ago

For what is worth, the fluent emojis from Microsoft, also named Segoe UI Emoji, have a 2D and 3D versions. They are beautiful! Although I'm not sure if the 3D ones are just complex vector images made to simulate depth with clever gradients and shadows, or were actually 3D rendered. I even saw some animations of them somewhere. Super cute

ComputerGuru4• 5 days ago

If you mean the new windows 11 emoji, they are some of the ugliest design with I’ve ever seen, and I say this as someone that appreciated the previous windows 10 style despite the hate it got.

AlienRobot• 5 days ago

Emoji are such a terrible idea. What it means depends entirely on what the emoji designer wants.

There was an article shared here by emojipedia that showed, besides the obvious gun emoji turning into a toy gun and then back into a gun, subtle differences between designs changing the MEANING of a message on the internet.

Can you imagine if you write a word like "imagine" that changes meaning depending on what font the user has installed? It's probably a nightmare for preservation as well. You can't record the text, you have to record a screenshot of the emoji because in 50 years who knows what it's going to look like!

ComputerGuru4• 5 days ago

Emoji with the darkest skin tones can be difficult to see in dark mode — a problem for anyone who sends or receives them. That’s why we built an AI-powered contrast tool that analyzes each emoji at the pixel level, flags when the contrast ratio is too low and suggests high-contrast solutions that are implemented by designers

What part of this is AI? What part of that couldn’t have been done without it? Do they just mean they vibecoded it?

nine_k• 5 days ago

Image generation, I suppose. That is, I expect this to not be just a gamma correction.

xg153• 5 days ago

Maybe they call any kind of algorithm that accesses the content of media (e.g. pixel colors) and not just metadata "AI" now?

inigyou7• 5 days ago

Decision trees are AI

xgulfie• 5 days ago

Translation: someone at Google said "Microsoft has this, why don't we?"

herpdyderp• 5 days ago

I was thinking Apple, these look like the Apple emojis to me.

karashi• 5 days ago

It’s not mentioned in the article, but I’m really disappointed that the backpack emoji was made generic and westernized losing its original meaning. It used to be a randoseru style backpack but was recently changed. Does anyone else care though?

reichstein• 5 days ago

Probably don't care.

I have no idea what "randoseru" means, or what kind of backpack it is. Looking it up, it seems to be a design that carries special meaning in Japan, and not really anywhere else. While other countries _may_ have similar designs, it's not something special to them.

Even if the emoji looked like a ranoseru backpack, it wouldn't mean anything to most people. If anything, the front pocket is more likely to be associated with a backpack used for school.

internet20002• 5 days ago

It's nice they're sharing the 3D model files, and I like they're getting closer to the standard Apple look. But designing them in 3D isn't super novel. It's the Apple approach since iOS 10.2 https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-10-2-emoji-changelog/

smusamashah2• 5 days ago

I am glad emojis have stayed aways from modern icon designers (or directors?). I did get a little panic looking at 3d version at a glance that are we slowly making them corporate bland too? So far we haven't done that to general ones. Google's own blob emojis are bland though, they will take us there if these were all up to them.

Planktonne• 5 days ago

This article represents such a poverty of imagination and culture that I find it genuinely concerning. What is wrong with the people behind this?

They've correctly identified that a lot of emoji use is figurative, but then are trying to contribute to that by making them 3D. Here is a symbol you use meaningfully, we made it different to help.

It's just so wrong-headed, like responding to the news of someone's beloved cat dying by saying they should just get another. A total failure of understanding the thing they are pontificating about.

KetoManx64• 2 days ago

Classic case of "The company is paying me and I don't have any real work to do so let's create some so I don't actually have to do anything actually useful"

alance• 4 days ago

As soon as the thumbs-up started rotating and the severed wrist was revealed, it became apparent: I had never wondered where the rest of the thumbs-up person was before. But more chillingly: A thumbs-up from a person off-screen is fine, a disembodied hand wishing me apparent good-will? Not so good. It's a corpse-part!

Designing emoji for the way we communicate today

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