💬 The Wrap
Hello and welcome to the first edition of the Emoji Wrap for 2022! 👋😃
Additionally, Happy Year of The Tiger to all those that celebrate Chinese New Year! 🐯🧧
Late last week Apple released their first beta for iOS 15.4, giving us a first look at their designs for the 112 new emojis from Emoji 14.0.
New emojis supported within this beta update include Melting Face, Dotted Line Face, and Face with Open Eyes and Hand Over Mouth - the latter of which required a change to the existing 🤭 Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji's design.
Based on past iOS beta history it's likely that the final public release of iOS 15.4 will come to users in March or April 2022. 🔜📱
Emojipedia itself also has some news this month: after steering our good ship for nine years, our founder Jeremy Burge will tomorrow be passing the reigns over to myself as the site's new Editor in Chief. This is an incredible honor, and I will ensure that Emojipedia remains the world's #1 emoji resource under my stewardship. 🙏🙇
Also in this edition of the Emoji Wrap: how 🅿️ P Button emoji use has been pushed upwards, the background to all those 🟩 Green Squares you've been seeing on Twitter, the origin story of the Windows Fluent emoji set, and 🐢 Turtle emojis all the way down.
📰 News
🍏 First Look: New Emojis in iOS 15.4
Coming to iOS 15.4 in March or April are 112 new emojis from Unicode's 2021 Emoji 14.0 recommendation list. These include the Melting Face, Heart Hands, Biting Lip, Beans, and a variety of new skin tone variants for the 🤝 Handshake emoji.
Released late last week to those signed up to Apple's Developer Program, the first iOS 15.4 beta gives us a first look at how these emojis will likely appear come the official release of iOS 15.4.
👥 Microsoft Teams Fluent emojis delayed to February
While the 2D incarnations of the Windows 11 Fluent emojis have been available since November of last year, the 3D incarnations have yet to make their debut.
However, this report seems to indicate that we can expect them to materialize on platforms such as Microsoft Teams - which presently features the same emoticons as Skype - at some stage in the coming month. In the meantime, you can read about the origins of the Fluent emoji set.
🐯 Year of the Tiger Emojis Roar into Life
Happy Year of the 🐅 Tiger! Here we look into the history of the Chinese zodiac within the emoji keyboard and make an interesting discovery in relation to Chinese New Year and Twitter data across the years of the 🐀 Rat (2020), 🐂 Ox (2021), and 🐅 Tiger (2022). We also assess the scale of the 🧧 Red Envelope emoji's popularity at this time of year.
📙 Keith Broni is Emojipedia's New Editor in Chief
As of tomorrow, I am no longer the Deputy Emoji Officer and am instead Emojipedia's new Editor in Chief.
I am greatly honored by this opportunity, and I owe a momentous debt of gratitude to the site’s founder, Jeremy Burge, who's looking forward to not bemusing hairdressers as much going forward.
💭 Interesting
What Is 🅿️?
To promote his song with Future and Young Thug entitled 'Pushing P', American rapper Gunna has started using the humble 🅿️ P Button emoji to encapsulate the positivity that the "p" in 'Pushing P' is intended to encapsulate.
Here Complex provides additional background to Gunna's rationale in pushing the 🅿️ emoji.
🪟 The making of Fluent emoji
Here Microsoft Distinguished Designer Nando Costa goes into detail on the origins and design process behind Microsoft's Fluent emoji redesign.
🟩 He Made Wordle for His Partner. Now It’s an Online Hit.
The biggest craze across Twitter at this point in 2022 has been Worlde, thanks in part to its emoji-based social sharing function.
Here the New York Times goes into the backstory of why you're seeing all those 🟩 Green Square, 🟨 Yellow Square, and ⬜ White Large Square emojis as well as other emoji-based pastiches.
📚 Free Yourself from Literacy, with Emojis
A New Yorker humor section video that introduces Henry Kazinski - a leading voice in the "radical emoji-activist movement" who'll apparently "stop at nothing in his fight to eradicate “regular literacy” and finally free us from the tyranny of meaning".
Mr. Kazinski has clearly taken considerable inspiration from Fred Benenson's 🐋 Emoji Dick.
🧑💻 Can emoji use be the key in detecting remote-work burnout?
Does emoji use belie remote working burnout amongst software developers? It would appear so.
This study from the University of Michigan School of Information found that by using a machine learning model, they could predict dropouts with 75% accuracy based on a developer's emoji use on GitHub.
🐢 Daily Turtle Emojis
For near a year, this Tumblr blog has been sharing a daily custom mash-up design featuring Google's incredibly popular 🐢 Turtle emoji.
These give us an idea of what presently-unsupported mash-ups could eventually look like in Google's Emoji Kitchen.
🤗 Lastly
That's it for this edition of the Emoji Wrap! We hope that 2022 has been treating you well thus far. 🌯💌
If you'd like to keep up-to-date with the latest emoji news as it happens, you can follow Emojipedia on Twitter, as well as the members of our Emojipedia team:
- 📚 Our Senior Emoji Lexicographer Jane Solomon
- 🎨 Our Head of Emoji Design Joshua Jones
- 📰 And me, Emojipedia Editor in Chief Keith Broni