It Can Take 2 Years To Create An Emoji

We use Emojis in place of actual a word or sentence as a more convenient way to get a certain message across. In addition to this, it adds more meaning or emphasis to what we are trying to convey to the other party. But as trivial as emojis may seem, they are actually quite complicated to create.

Jennifer Daniel, Google’s creative director for emoji (yes, that’s her title) wanted to create a more inclusive handshake emoji with varying skin tones to cater to the global user demographic. She found out that that isn’t as simple as creating a new picture, then slapping onto the panel.

Instead, emojis are treated like any other alphabet. When we press the letter ‘A’, a computer/smartphone doesn’t see it that way. Unlike humans, computers use binary, which is language based around the numbers 0 and 1, to interpret the world around them.

As such, each letter or in this case emoji, has to be signed a unique identifier that will allow any computer to interpret it the correct way. That’s why, according to Jennifer, it can take up to 2 years to develop and implement an emoji – a ridiculous amount of time for something that we consider this trivial.

She had to submit her work to the Unicode technical community to create 25 possible combinations of different handshake skin tones. Since a single tone handshake emoji had already been created, and a unique identifier assigned to it, the team realised that it was close to impossible to implement one with several different skin tones.

Every unicode character has to be encoded. For example, the letter ‘A’ has a unicode point U+0041. The same applies to emojis. Each has its own unique unicode point that needs to be added to the system. This created a problem for Jennifer and her team.

After much brainstorming and deliberation, they came up with the idea of adding a leftwards hand and rightwards hand, handshake. Once the code point was assigned, the team could now add the multi-skin toned handshake that could be built on the newly created code for each hand.

We can expect to see the new emojis to grace our keyboards in Emoji 14.0 that is scheduled to be released in 2022. This is great news, because according to Jennifer, the Unicode Consortium and Google really care about bringing inclusion into the unicode standard.