Behold! Over 200 New Emojis Are Coming Your Way
Spiders! Middle fingers! "Man in business suit levitating"! TIME TO GET EXCITED!!
By Sadho Ram — 18 Jun 2014, 06:23 PM — Updated over 10 years ago
The Unicode Consortium has published a list of 250 new Emoji that they hope Google, Apple, Twitter and the rest will all come to embrace
Sometimes it's just too hard to express how we're feeling with words -- that's when emojis come in handy. But we were left with a virtual loss of words when it came to conveying emotions like raising a Vulcan hand signal, or flipping someone the bird. Those emojis didn't exist -- until now.
The overseer of standard icons, the Unicode Consortium, announced Monday it's debuting 2,834 new characters with its updated Unicode Standard 7.0 version. Within those thousands of new characters, about 250 are emoji, or "pictographic symbols."
cnet.comNot many photos have been released of the new icons, but they’ll be added to the Emojipedia "as soon as they are available"
Some of the new emojis are computer-themed, such as floppy disks, printers, and keyboards. We’ll also be able to go to war with our friends via text, as Emoji is releasing military airplanes, boats, and rockets.
theguardian.com
Besides the Vulcan symbol and middle finger, other new emoji include two people making out, a John Travolta-like disco dancer, a spy, a spider web, and three kinds of floppy disks. Others show a man in a business suit levitating, a joystick, and a rolled up newspaper -- perfect for swatting.
cnet.com
Meanwhile, the Unicode Consortium have just updated their example library with all of the new characters
These example charts have two purposes: to serve as an inspiration/foundation for any artists tasked with creating icons for each of the newly proposed characters, and to explain what the heck the characters with ambiguous names like “Three Rays Right” or “Right Anger Bubble” might be.
techcrunch.com
For the rest of us, though, it’s just an easier at-a-glance look at all of the new emoji. You can see the full chart here. The newly added Emoji are those highlighted in yellow.
cnet.comWhile there are dozens of new, weird, funny, and off-the-wall emojis, it appears the update is still pretty weak on people of different races
The lack of emoji diversity has been an ongoing complaint over the past couple of years and even caused Apple to point to the issue in March saying "we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard."
cnet.comEven though there are a few new emoji people of color, there's still a ways to go until the full human rainbow is represented. The Unicode Consortium said in its emoji FAQ that it's continuing to work on the issue. "Because there are concerns regarding the emoji characters for people, proposals are being developed by Unicode Consortium members to provide more diversity," the consortium wrote.
theguardian.com