Do people care enough to choose the correct skin tone and stuff? It is mostly "set it and forget" though for the singular person emojis, so it makes sense. Would you spend time to choose the right tones, genders etc on a handshake emoji?
On iOS, at least, it's a simple 'press-and-hold' to get the variants which then persist.
> Do people care enough to choose the correct skin tone and stuff?
I have, yeah, at least on the ones I use regularly. It would be great if the OS could notice that I've changed N of them and offer to set the default for the rest rather than me having to do it each time, mind.
actually i believe on first use i believe the tone picker opens, making you select one, which it remembers. Then you can change with press-and-hold
With handshake being one of the few without a way to customize the skin color it makes sens that it is worked on.
Why? The way I look at this graphic: they are schematic cartoon repræsentation of nail-less, hairless hands that are quite minimal, and originally were in a shade of amber that no human skin would ever have.
These are clearly abstractions; human hands have a variety of variations to them:
- finger length
- finger thickness
- nail length
- amount of hair
- visibility of tendons
- missing fingers
- extra fingers
- perhaps partially missing fingers
I do not see why such would need to be reflected in a schematic abstraction.
Personally, I have long, thin fingers, relatively long nails that are painted black, relative hairlnessness, very visible tendons, and a copper-ish skin color that is not well reflected in all the skin color options.
I cannot say I see a particular reason to select something that can approximate the look of my own hands for this, nor can such feasibly be done with the sheer amount of individual variance.
> With handshake being one of the few without a way to customize the skin color it makes sens that it is worked on.
I agree that excluding handshakes is inconsistent. I simply find it odd to say there is a need whatsoever to allow or skin color customization, and only limit it to what seems to be a linear progression from latte to chestnut, which does not even capture all common tones of human skin, and why would one stop there? If one is going to allow color customization, it seems better to have a mechanism to actually select r.g.b.a. color values.
The linear gradient between two polar extremes seems to suggest if anything that it was motivated by a U.S.A. “race” based incentive, that is known to often reason as though what they call “black” and “white” are the only two “races” on the planet.
It seems an odd priority with an odd implementation.
And while I almost never use emoji, some people use them a lot.
As I said, if skin tones should be customization, then simply allow for an a.r.g.b value of some sorts.
ARGB Skin tones are technically difficult to implement in unicode and would explode the amount of work needed by emoji font designers. It's always a trade-off between enabling expression and keeping it practical.
Of course it’s fine to represent these concepts in graphics/picture form; I’m not trying to squelch that we have differences that might be relevant to marketing contact lenses, reproductive healthcare, fitness, or hair services. It’s just not obvious that we need to express the full spectrum of humans with high-fidelity across many dimensions in fonts.
I truly hope that my unborn great-grandchildren look with confused derision on the level of importance we currently assign to skin color.
As a white person, if I ever did a "handshake" emoji with a person of colour (and that's assuming if I even knew they were - you can't always tell over chat) I think I would default to just double-yellow [1]. I think to do anything else would be a minefield - did I get the shade wrong? Am I being patronising?
[1] and I rather that was just double-blue or something, due to the way yellow could be misconstrued.