Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

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> "realistic"

I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow - roughly, the sort of effect you would get from a static rendering of a cheap 3D model in a Unity mobile game.

I agree with you, although I will say that the current version of the Noto Color Emoji font is (IMO) the best up-to-date color emoji, because it mostly eschews this fake realism that feels uncomfortable and disconcerting in other emoji fonts. I'd prefer hyper-stylized "blobs", but I think they deserve some credit for avoiding the worst of skeuomorphic design.

See for example the "realistic" 3D rendering of the hand on the Apple emoji for "thinking face", it's firmly in uncanny valley for me. [1] The Noto emojis remain fairly stylized without being hideous like the Microsoft emojis.

Google also deserves from credit for drastically improving the rendering of many of these emojis over time. This has happened quietly enough that I doubt most people have noticed. They brought back the more blob-like turtle [2], which really deserves to be compared to the horrible, awkward plastic children's toy that is the Apple rendering. Or take a look at how awful the gradients are on the Android 8-10 emoji [3] and compare to more recent versions. [4]

I think we will look back at awkward 3D renderings in many emoji styles as a mistake. They remind me quite a bit of the terrible DreamWorks animation style [5] of the early '00s.

[1] https://emojipedia.org/thinking-face/

[2] https://emojipedia.org/turtle/

[3] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-10.0/

[4] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-11.0/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_Tale

> I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow

No, not really; the problem is more, taking things that were originally introduced with the intention of being abstract pictograms signifying emotions; and adding enough un-called-for detail (i.e. details not required by the Unicode codepoint description) as to make things like gender and race seem like a relevant or even necessary property.

Consider: in all modern implementations, "emotion" emoji are displayed with... heads. Opaque backing "vaguely skin-tinted" blobs at the very least; full-on human heads with ears and noses and hair in some fonts.

They don't need to be. Nothing about the Unicode codepoint for e.g. U+1F603 "grinning face with big eyes" says the "face" needs to even be visualized as being on a head. It could be doing a cheshire-cat-smile thing, just eyes and a mouth — ":D" but rotated 90 degrees. And, in fact, that's exactly what it was, in the DoCoMo image-font, one of the three that led to the Unicode introduction of emoji!

But for some reason, now we don't just have skeuomorphism (shiny eyes, pink mouths with tongues, blushing cheeks); we have these heads, and ears, and hair; and before you know it, people wondering why the head is yellow rather than some actual skin tone; or why the increasingly-less-generic face shape seems to be more masculine than feminine; etc.

Why not just cut the Gordian knot? Get rid of the "head" part. Get rid of any part that's not required to communicate the concept. Make an image-font of only the Minimum Viable Pictograms for what each of the Unicode codepoint descriptions describes.

Which is orthogonal to skeuomorphism, mind you. This isn't about whether a tongue has a tongue-ish texture to it. It's about whether you should include a tongue at all.

> They don't need to be. Nothing about the Unicode codepoint for e.g. U+1F603 "grinning face with big eyes" says the "face" needs to even be visualized as being on a head. It could be doing a cheshire-cat-smile thing, just eyes and a mouth — ":D" but rotated 90 degrees. And, in fact, that's exactly what it was, in the DoCoMo image-font, one of the three that led to the Unicode introduction of emoji!

Okay, one vendor opted to do simpler emoji, but the other two displayed faces, right? Moreover, Japanese carriers don’t have the monopoly on inventing small images expressing emotions. The "Western" world had ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and other IMs (say, Poland’s Gadu-Gadu). And all those had emoticons: typing ":D" would turn into an image of a yellow circle with eyes and a grinning mouth.

And personally, I would prefer the colorful, lively emoji, as opposed to plain punctuation turned 90 degrees. I guess all the current emoji vendors think this way.

I remember when my perfectly clear :) became one picture in yahoo messenger and another in AIM. You should have seen my face when the little <3 my boyfriend and I texted to each other became a gaudy, beating red heart right before my eyes. It's gotten easier to opt out of over the years, but there was a while there when none of the SMS apps allowed you to just send the text without converting it to whatever picture they thought you should want. I think if we'd never gone through that stage, I would hate them less. As it stands, we've made this a whole lot more complicated than it has to be and the art of interpreting the text emoticons is basically lost.

Also, I've got an ex-coworker in her late 40's who apparently now types in sentences where the majority of the parts of speech are replaced by an emoji. "Radishes are 'thumbs down' 'vomiting face'" and other statements built with the same grammar. She's an idiot and that was apparent long before this started, but it's gotten worse over the last 4-5 years.

Basically, I'd like to opt out of picture emojis. I'm not sure anything worthwhile has been communicated with them. Well, maybe leave out grandparents. My husband's grandmother isn't a fast typer, so she sends messages mostly made of sweet emojis and you know it's sent with love. But anyone actually trying to make a point with them irritates me. It feels like they're talking like a baby, but in print.

I absolutely agree with you. I see no need for emojis. Maybe it was fun when some IM apps started to turn text (like :-* ) into little images, but now we have software for making emojis, software for rendering emojis, thousands of utf8 codepoints for every possible emoji, emojis of all races and genders, bugs in software because it was supposed to have text input and can't handle emojis correctly, whole sites and fonts and keyboards made specifically for emojis… Did humanity really waste thousands of hours so that people can send a little poop image?

Can people just explain their feelings as they always did in the past, or if that's for some reason not possible, just send a photo or a jpeg of a smiling cartoonish face? Do we really need emojis as they are, sequences of bites that have to be standardized and render correctly on every device and any font?

I just don't get this obsession with emojis. It started as a fun toy, but now it's a huge waste of time for thousands of developers.

Emojis exist in Unicode because people have written emotion-face pictograms inline in text documents (even before the advent of computers!), and Unicode needs a way to encode those existing documents such that one ":D rotated 90 degrees" is machine-readably-identical to another ":D rotated 90 degrees." For the sake of e.g. screen readers, sentiment analysis, etc.

But there's no reason that said pictograms need to have a rendering like anything more than what people would draw them as on paper. The Unicode ellipsis exists to encode the separate intent of "writing an ellipsis" from just writing three dots — but it's still just rendered as three dots.

I'm surprised that Apple hasn't updated their skeuomorphic emojis.

They didn't look good even at the very beginning, and surely doesn't match Apple's design language/principle for.. at least 5 years. Apple is supposed to be the company that is obsessed with aesthetics yet they never update/redo the emojis.

Apple's emojis are fine. What's not fine is their treatment of them: apps can be rejected from the AppStore if they feature emojis on a screenshots, or have them on some button. What's worse, this rule is applied very inconsistently.

You realize not everyone thinks Apple emoji don’t look good? In particular in the younger demographic I’d be surprised if they were less liked than Android blob emojis. I mean, take GP’s comparison of the turtle, do you really think the Android ugly, and to be honest with a somewhat mentally challenged face, looks better than Apple’s turtle? Maybe you do, and maybe GP does too, but tons of people wouldn’t.

I’ve never used that many emoji in my messages than since I switched to iOS because their emojis carry way more meaning to me.

Looking good is subjective, I was more saying that it doesn't match/fit with Apple's general aesthetics today. Apple dropped skeuomorphic style from their UI a long time ago.

Yes the android turtle looks way better.

https://ibb.co/M8P2Hh4

To be clear, you’re saying that Google’s version looks better?

Alright, I am biting: Yes.

It also transports the idea of "turtle" better - especially when you deal with people who are unaware of the difference between turtles and tortoises, or who know not all turtles have extraordinary large giraffe-style necks. Not every turtle is a Galapagos tortoise.

Consider what turtles are usually looking like, according to Google Images: https://www.google.com/search?q=turtle&source=lnms&tbm=isch&...

You might want to add a -sea to that search, as it's mostly sea turtles. Heavily photographed, but not nearly as common as other kinds of turtles.

I agree with the sentiment though.

But do we need these distinctions? I mean, in French we don’t even have the nuance between turtles and tortoises, both are « tortues ». So whether it’s a long neck or short neck turtle, who cares? Do you often need to use specifically a turtle (not tortoise) emoji where the sense of what you mean radically change? Even if you use a Galapagos turtle emoji to talk about your non Galapagos pet turtle, is that so important to your story?

With symbols, it is often better to have simplified, general-purpose representations as compared to highly specific ones. E.g. it's better to have a highly stylized "aircraft" emoji [1] than a tiny, but screw-accurate variant of a weird little plane like the Edgely Ocular [2].

[1] https://emojipedia.org/airplane/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgley_Optica

Yes, and it's widely considered one of the best emojis. There are many videos about this turtle, e.g. https://youtu.be/13SxY1z7JFk?t=25

Yes! (And it seems like many others agree with me.)

To be clear, I do recognize that the Google one is "stylized" in a way that is not going to appeal to everyone. However, I claim that there is something objectively (or almost objectively) wrong and upsetting about the Apple style here. If you're going to do the whole "3D render" style, you simply have to do a better job than Apple has done here. As I said in my OP, it looks like a poor model from a mobile game or a early 00s DreamWorks film. It's simply not good enough work, regardless of whether you like "realistic" emoji art or not.

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