💬 The Wrap
What strange times we are in. Windows, previously the ugly step-child of emoji design, came out with a beautiful new emoji design this month, Android has added support for this year's new emojis before iOS, and emoji news hit headlines globally with Apple changing the gun emoji to a water pistol.
September will bring iOS 10 with new emoji designs, and a first-pass at new gendered emojis. Oddly, Unicode 9 emoji support is missing from iOS 10.0 betas, which leads me to believe Apple will have a second large emoji update with iOS 10.1 in October.
Samsung has new emojis coming too - but I don't yet have a release date for these yet. Never a dull moment.
📰 News
👪 52,000 Family Emoji Combinations Come To Windows
Microsoft made news this month with a complete redesign of every single emoji in Windows, along with support for single-parent families and inter-racial families and couples. Largest single emoji update of any major vendor to date.
😱 VICE interns give up emojis for five days
Some see emoji use as purely silly, but they can genuinely be useful in aiding text communication. See what happened to VICE interns when they went without.
🗣 No Words: Communicating Only Using Emoji
In the inverse of the aforementioned VICE article, Samantha Lee at Quartz tried a day using only emoji communication, and documented how she went.
🍰 Using Emoji in a Spotlight Search
Emoji search is spreading, and this guide shows how to use it on iOS. For example "the slice of cake (🍰) brought up a list of various bakeries in Maps."
🔫 Apple And The Gun Emoji
It feels like so long ago now, but earlier this month Apple announced a number of emoji changes, one of which included changing the pistol to display a water pistol. This could be problematic.
📖 Tweet the NY Public Library an Emoji
What a great feature. Tweet an emoji to the New York Public Library, and they will send back a relevant image from their archives. Fun, and clever.
🖥 Emoji Support Comes to Linux
Will 2017 be the year of desktop linux? Decent emoji support will be needed!
🎙 Emoji Wrap Podcast: Episode 1 With Mark Davis
Which country wanted two camel emojis, who proposed the middle finger emoji, emoji consistency, and if we’re getting female emojis, what happened to gender-neutrality? Topics I discuss with Mark Davis in this first episode of the Emoji Wrap podcast.
👽 Android 7.0 Nougat Emoji Changelog
Android 7.0 was released last week and includes full support for Unicode 9 emojis, new designs which are closer to their iOS counterparts, and a dropping of the gender-neutral blob-people. Lots of small tweaks too which are worth checking out. Google has paid a lot of attention to detail in this update.
🔣 Unicode
🗓 What's Planned for Emoji 4.0
This year will see two emoji updates from Unicode. The first was Unicode 9.0 back in June, which coincided with Emoji 3.0. The draft release of Emoji 4.0 is now out with gendered emojis, new professions, and a rainbow flag.
📝 Proposed Update UTR #51, Unicode Emoji (Version 4.0)
The review period for the proposed Emoji 4.0 update ends on October 24, 2016. Feedback can be submitted through the online reporting form linked within this Unicode announcement.
🗓 Events
🗓 Sep 28-29: Design Matters
A two day design conference in Copenhagen, Denmark now in its second year. A great line-up of top designers will be speaking, and me (not a top designer, but don't let that put you off!).
🗓 Nov 4-6: Emojicon
It's just two months until Emojicon, held at California College of the Arts in San Fransisco. Speakers and guests include many notable emoji figures: members of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, the founder of Emojipedia (me!), and a digital curator from MoMA.
🤗 Lastly
Thanks so much to everyone who subscribed in the past month, welcome to your first issue! Emoji Wrap now has 5,000 subscribers, and I really do appreciate you letting me into your inbox each month. I know I'm pretty cautious about how many emails I get, so thanks for keeping this in your subscriptions.
If you want more behind the scenes and emoji news between emails you can find me on Twitter at @jeremyburge or follow Emoji Wrap at @emojiwrap. You might have also noticed the new Emoji Wrap podcast, for emoji news in a more laid back audio format, with special guests each episode.
That's all from me, and I'll be in your inbox next month!