This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Dmitry Dvoinikov.
Original Post: On Emoji
Feed Title: Things That Require Further Thinking
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThingsThatRequireFurtherThinking
Feed Description: Once your species has evolved language, and you have learned language, [...] and you have something to say, [...] it doesn't take much time, energy and effort to say it. The hard part of course is having something interesting to say.
-- Geoffrey Miller
I'm having hard times grasping this originally Japanese thing. The word rhymes with "emotion", and although in Japanese it had no such meaning, it apparently was intended to express a notion, feeling or emotion in a single hieroglyphic depicting some character or other. It just so happened that after some time it became a (Unicode) standard alternative to smileys and other pictographs.
Speaking of smileys, I may have an emotional range of a teaspoon, but I can't tell what most of those emoji faces mean. Each time I pull up the emoji palette in an application, I'm always stuck at which to pick, despite of seemingly wide choice. They don't convey any emotion I can possibly want to express. Don't get me wrong, they may be perfectly suited to express a notion of a pile of shit but this is not what I need from an emotion. And even with faces, wtf ?
For the purpose of illustration I've picked a few, but you can imagine the rest. Here, see for yourself, and mind that it is an international standard, no less.
So I believe the entire emoji thing was a designer's experiment, a hip toy, which was backed by the Unicode consortium in order to keep filling their seemingly endless code pages, and from there application developers picked it as a "standard" way smileys should be done. Quite unfortunate really.
Please, PLEASE, use something like Kolobok, or hire a designer and at least make your smileys look like Skype's.
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