Google has created a new emoji (variable) font with “Noto Emoji” whose defining feature is a black-and-white design, trying to capture the “simplicity” of the format — and it just so happens to bring back the blobs.
Emojis have become more detailed over time. Rather than representing a broad concept, emoji are designed as a surreal trend. This is not a problem unless the specificity of skeuomorphism causes your keyboard to exclude other similar concepts.
Google is defying the trend of realism with Noto Emoji by “removing as much detail as possible.” The goal of this group is to make emoji “more flexible, representing an idea of something, rather than something concretely presented in front of you.” For example, today’s dance emoji apparently represent only one form of dance at the expense of others dance.
Many resulted in 1:1 conversions, but there were several design challenges related to simplification that prevented Google from redrawing emojis, especially logos, in only black and white:
You can’t simply convert the logo to black and white. You won’t be able to tell the difference between Finland and Sweden. You can repaint the flags, but that puts them at risk of being incorrect. Instead, we used ISO country codes. These sequences of letters are unique and represent each country.
Meanwhile, the characters in Noto Emoji are represented using Google’s blob characters:
Correlation without maintaining distinctions between genders. Google’s blob emoji are really special. Cute, soft and very friendly. We were able to bring back some of the things that made them special, while discarding the parts that didn’t work. Most notably, Spot’s facial expressions are very inconsistent, but easily fixed in black and white mode.
That said, a modern aspect of Noto Emoji is that it’s a variable font, with weight classes that make characters appear “light” or “thick”. As with all other aspects, there are dark and light modes and the ability to change text/character colors.
Noto Emoji is open source and is now available from Google Fonts. It supports the latest Unicode 14.0 specification with a total of 3,663 emojis.
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