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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It started with Facebook in 2017: https://buck.co/work/facebook-alegria

It's popular because 1) it's cheap and easy to produce since it doesn't take much talent 2) it's easily vectorized and resizable 3) its color pallet and disproportionate human forms are supposed to make it feel universal.

Google copied Facebook, then a bunch of companies copied Google. And now finally Apple is onboard too. It's not a good look for Apple, which usually tries to create design trends, not follow them.

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> its color pallet and disproportionate human forms makes it feel universal

So we went from having Homer Simpson universal-color emojis, to a pallet of specific-color emojis, to be more inclusive. And then switched from stock photos of diverse people, to Homer Simpson cartoons, to be more universal.

We're just making this all up from year to year, aren't we?

Not exactly – the "Homer Simpson" yellow emoji came after the initial (Apple) emoji font, which just had all the humans looking white, with no other options.

Long before non-Japanese started calling them "emoji", we had "smilies" and they were yellow.

Yes. PhpBB and my Nokia feature phone have had yellow smilies since before iPhones were a thing.

This is accurate. https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/smiley...

This is false. The first emojis were Japanese in origin and were the first to use yellow faces. Apple copied the existing style from the Japanese illustrations.

This is untrue. Not that any of them look like Simpsons characters, but the only emoji option on iOS for like five years was the yellow-shaded cartoon face. It's still the default skin tone in most emoji sets.

https://emojipedia.org/emoji-1.0/

The cartoon faces have always been yellow, but the human ones, e.g. hands or gendered faces, were not until 2015 (on iOS). https://emojipedia.org/apple/iphone-os-2.2/

There was a lot of discourse about it at the time. https://www.fastcompany.com/3016256/are-emojis-racist

The companies need to represent everyone, individuals want to represent themselves. There is no conflict here.

Facebook: We don't just tolerate bad design we celebrate it!

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