alt.hn

7/17/2026 at 4:24:13 PM

Designing emoji for the way we communicate today

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

by pentagrama

7/17/2026 at 7:47:58 PM

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.

by ollin

7/17/2026 at 10:59:56 PM

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

by echoangle

7/17/2026 at 11:02:10 PM

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

by ButlerianJihad

7/17/2026 at 11:39:03 PM

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

by rcxdude

7/17/2026 at 11:09:23 PM

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?

by ComputerGuru

7/17/2026 at 11:29:59 PM

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.

by starshadowx2

7/18/2026 at 9:16:32 AM

Ah, thanks for the info they are different emoji and the diagram is just wrong. Was thinking the same how such a redesign could lead to misunderstandings.

by xg15

7/18/2026 at 9:12:05 AM

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?

by xg15

7/19/2026 at 12:58:39 AM

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

by cosmicriver

7/17/2026 at 8:03:02 PM

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:

by magicalist

7/17/2026 at 7:07:26 PM

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.

by BoppreH

7/18/2026 at 4:58:44 AM

>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?

by why_at

7/18/2026 at 7:30:15 PM

Always look on the smile side of janus

by warumdarum

7/17/2026 at 7:18:10 PM

> 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.

by magicalist

7/17/2026 at 7:24:26 PM

> 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.

by BoppreH

7/17/2026 at 8:15:44 PM

> > 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.

Well by "everyone" I meant platform companies, app makers, and website designers. There's literally no way you'll get them to agree on a font choice.

> "We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".

First you'd have to get Apple to license their emoji font, presumably open source and freely available if you truly want it to be standardized across platforms. Have they ever open sourced a font? Or get Apple to agree to use someone else's font as the system default. Have they ever done that?

Second, if you forbid app developers from choosing an emoji font, the Facebooks of the world are just going to work around you by stripping out the emoji and manually inserting theirs in. Somewhat ironically, by ignoring the platform emoji font, which can lead to some jarring text rendering if you're used to the system font, apps like Facebook are fulfilling your dream of standardized unicode across platforms...but of course, only for users of their apps.

Third, I think you really underestimate the fundamental disagreements here. The Unicode Technical Committee has a working group to try to improve unicode interoperability, and victories are on the level of getting vendors to agree if the standard for the Lotus emoji should mention that it shouldn't include a lillypad (they decided no[1]). They're working on this, but it's never going to be what you want.

In any case, I understand what you're saying and I wasn't dismissing the fact that the precise emoji design can influence why you used that emoji at all, which gets lost in the translation to another emoji font.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25230-esr-report-utc185.pdf

by magicalist

7/18/2026 at 1:09:11 AM

> 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

by internet2000

7/18/2026 at 1:34:53 AM

> 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.

by skillina

7/18/2026 at 7:29:14 PM

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

by warumdarum

7/18/2026 at 10:52:31 AM

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

by inigyou

7/17/2026 at 4:59:32 PM

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.

by xd1936

7/17/2026 at 5:47:18 PM

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

by xfalcox

7/17/2026 at 6:52:03 PM

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.

by paularmstrong

7/17/2026 at 8:20:54 PM

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...

by magicalist

7/17/2026 at 6:41:02 PM

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

by fnoef

7/17/2026 at 7:42:37 PM

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?

by quentindanjou

7/17/2026 at 7:15:02 PM

We have Times New Roman! Stop designing new fonts!

by sghiassy

7/17/2026 at 11:42:36 PM

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.

by ksymph

7/18/2026 at 10:56:35 AM

Who is stopping you using more than one emoji font?

by inigyou

7/18/2026 at 11:47:48 AM

Uh, the platforms? Have you tried to use two different emoji fonts on a web page? Or a text editor?

by Joker_vD

7/18/2026 at 12:03:01 PM

No, because I don't care about emojis. You care about emojis, so you should try it.

by inigyou

7/18/2026 at 4:13:15 PM

The problem is that it is not enabled by the mediums we use to communicate.

and are copied and pasted from emojicopy.com and getemoji.com respectively. They appear differently on each website, and yet identical here when copied and pasted. It is not possible for me (or anyone at this time) to comment with two different graphical representations of the same emoji in a comment on this site.

edit: apparently HN is a no fun zone and doesn't allow emojis, but give it a shot and you'll see that they change when you paste them in a new page.

Take the cat from the 9to5 link in the other comments. If I like using the smirking cat, for instance, to indicate potentially devious behavior, I will no longer have that option because they are turning it in to a smiling cat.

It would be possible in editting software, of course, just like fonts, but in messaging (the original and arguable core use of emoji) not so much.

by goodmythical

7/18/2026 at 7:56:28 PM

I can't comment with more than two graphical representations of the letter Q either. All I get is Q and Q - I can't make HN display a cursive Q.

by inigyou

7/18/2026 at 12:09:24 AM

Fair point

by sghiassy

7/17/2026 at 7:27:23 PM

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.

by graypegg

7/17/2026 at 6:43:57 PM

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.

by bigyabai

7/17/2026 at 6:58:18 PM

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.

by Analemma_

7/17/2026 at 9:30:54 PM

> Approximately nobody thought Google’s current emoji family needed a total overhaul

According to who, a sample size of you?

I don't love their current emojis. The older, flat "blob" style was much better, and if I had my druthers we'd be getting a 3D remaster of those.

> stop breaking our pattern recognition

OS updates will come all the same, it's your job to select and enforce a style that you prefer. If not, your emojis will be like system fonts; outside of your control, changed at the whims of your OEM. And we all know that Apple and Google love breaking your muscle memory.

by bigyabai

7/18/2026 at 10:57:22 AM

Google works as an organisation where you get promoted for redesigning stuff. Google will always endlessly redesign stuff and kill products and start new products because that's what it rewards.

by inigyou

7/17/2026 at 7:10:53 PM

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.

by ezst

7/18/2026 at 10:53:26 AM

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

by inigyou

7/17/2026 at 6:57:57 PM

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

by summermusic

7/17/2026 at 8:50:48 PM

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

by sph

7/17/2026 at 11:10:12 PM

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

by ComputerGuru

7/17/2026 at 7:43:15 PM

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

by thih9

7/17/2026 at 6:16:44 PM

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

by doublepg23

7/17/2026 at 7:00:15 PM

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

by 0110101001

7/18/2026 at 3:36:45 AM

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

by smusamashah

7/18/2026 at 4:01:14 AM

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

by doublepg23

7/17/2026 at 11:05:29 PM

> 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?

by ComputerGuru

7/18/2026 at 9:21:22 AM

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

by xg15

7/17/2026 at 11:18:06 PM

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

by nine_k

7/18/2026 at 10:58:17 AM

Decision trees are AI

by inigyou

7/18/2026 at 12:04:55 PM

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.

by Planktonne

7/20/2026 at 9:29:45 PM

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"

by KetoManx64

7/17/2026 at 7:00:52 PM

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

by hgoel

7/17/2026 at 7:16:09 PM

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

by ChrisArchitect

7/17/2026 at 7:36:43 PM

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

by cryzinger

7/18/2026 at 1:03:08 AM

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/

by internet2000

7/17/2026 at 7:05:57 PM

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

by awestroke

7/17/2026 at 7:47:51 PM

Overheated face emoji

by thih9

7/17/2026 at 7:07:46 PM

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

by jawns

7/17/2026 at 7:18:07 PM

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.

by jaredsohn

7/18/2026 at 4:18:17 PM

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!

by alance

7/18/2026 at 3:33:46 AM

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.

by smusamashah

7/17/2026 at 6:11:59 PM

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.

by smlacy

7/17/2026 at 8:24:15 PM

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

by arecsu

7/17/2026 at 11:11:32 PM

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.

by ComputerGuru

7/17/2026 at 7:14:18 PM

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.

by xnx

7/17/2026 at 8:20:09 PM

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

by xnx

7/17/2026 at 7:43:19 PM

>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?

by charcircuit

7/17/2026 at 7:45:27 PM

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

by thih9

7/17/2026 at 7:50:22 PM

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.

by charcircuit

7/17/2026 at 8:12:01 PM

IMHO it’s still just that: early emoji use was literal and later use got more [nail polish emoji].

Not sure why ROFL is relevant, a typical emoji user is likely unfamiliar with internet slang.

by thih9

7/17/2026 at 5:50:03 PM

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

by andrepd

7/17/2026 at 6:09:06 PM

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

by nibbleyou

7/17/2026 at 7:34:27 PM

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.

by Chu4eeno

7/19/2026 at 12:26:01 PM

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.

by dTal

7/17/2026 at 6:24:36 PM

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

by Rebelgecko

7/18/2026 at 1:21:11 AM

Gemini is so prone to saying masterclass that I have standing instructions for it to never use it, expect literally.

by jeffbee

7/17/2026 at 7:00:44 PM

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..

by tamimio

7/17/2026 at 7:12:06 PM

cool, meanwhile people will use pixelated pepes instead

by guluarte

7/17/2026 at 7:14:22 PM

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

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

by cyberax

7/18/2026 at 12:41:53 AM

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?

by karashi

7/18/2026 at 6:04:12 AM

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.

by reichstein

7/17/2026 at 11:04:32 PM

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!

by AlienRobot

7/17/2026 at 6:12:52 PM

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.

by IAmBroom

7/17/2026 at 6:19:39 PM

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

by thunderfork

7/17/2026 at 6:26:59 PM

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.

by CharlesW

7/18/2026 at 12:19:33 AM

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

by xgulfie

7/18/2026 at 12:43:23 AM

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

by herpdyderp

7/17/2026 at 6:44:11 PM

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

rofl

by MDCore

7/17/2026 at 7:12:22 PM

ROFLCOPTER!

by pbhjpbhj

7/17/2026 at 6:58:35 PM

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

by havefunbesafe

7/17/2026 at 7:09:11 PM

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.

by graypegg

7/17/2026 at 7:28:45 PM

[flagged]

by GoyRecognizer

7/17/2026 at 7:54:23 PM

Their priorities are all messed up. There are 12 emojis for pregnant non-women: 6 shades of pregnant men and 6 shades of pregnant non-binaries.

But there's no emoji for things you do need, like pouting face (you're forced to use enraged face which is too strong).

by xdennis

7/17/2026 at 8:35:36 PM

[flagged]

by squidbeak