Credit: Emojipedia
I wonder if we’ll ever be able to have a complete conversation in images.
Unicode, the company that makes pretty much all emojis ever, has finalized the thirteenth version of their offerings. If you thought there was already an emoji of everything ever, well, I could’ve told you that was wrong even before this happened. I was texting my dad about the Super Bowl last week, and there wasn’t a single emoji of a football player! But I digress.
The new catalog includes 62 brand new emoji, with 55 skin-tone and gender variants, totaling in 117 new glyphs altogether. We’ve got a crying smiley face, a Groucho Marx smiley, a ninja, various foods, some new animals and insects, cultural things like matryoshka dolls, and a bunch of other miscellaneous objects like helmets and boomerangs. I don’t know what kind of conversation would necessitate the image of a boomerang, but better to be prepared, I suppose. Also, there is a slew of parenting and marriage-related emojis representing both genders, as well as a transgender pride flag. Also a dude in a Santa hat, but I don’t think we’re going to get any immediate usage out of that one.
The standard designs for the new glyphs are good and done, but it’ll be a little longer before they hit phones. Each mobile provider like Apple and Google and so forth need to adapt the new emojis to their personal styles and preferences. The new emojis should be available on all chatting apps before the end of the year, though.
