How do emojis work?

This piece is a part of a joint project by type.today journal and a website focused on various grammatical and broader language issues, gramota.ru. In our series of three episodes, we will approach the topic of emoji from a technological perspective, share how people of different cultures understand certain emojis differently, and address whether it is possible to sue someone who has (allegedly) picked the wrong emoji.

Emojis look different on different platforms and devices. If we draw an analogy with the type world, the emojis are more of a writing system, and each platform (and every operating system) uses its own font to display them.

I don’t understand emoji hostility in type design. A new globally understood ideogrammatical alphabet is developing right before our eyes. It’s not made of monochromatic strokes like the rest of the Unicode table, but it’s a writing system. Ray Larabie TypeDrawers

Apple Emoji is probably the most widely used of these typefaces, but — although it is installed by default on all devices produced by Apple — it cannot be used in commercial design projects. Windows also has its own emoji font installed on all Windows-running devices, but anyone can buy a license for it. Android devices use Noto Color Emoji. As this typeface is an open-source font, you can not only download it for free, but also modify it. Independent designers develop emoji typefaces, too, and quite often introduce certain emojis to their type projects.

Emoji color fonts

Today’s most common emojis are those offered by color fonts of various formats. Apple emojis are an SBIX font comprised of bitmap images. A designer working on an SBIX uploads five images of different sizes into the font editor software, ranging from 32 to 512 pixels wide. That is why one cannot use SBIX fonts in a very large size.

There are also color fonts comprised of vector images — those are fonts of COLR, CPAL, and SVG formats. This category includes fonts such as Segoe UI Emoji and Noto Color Emoji.

Some type designers are skeptical towards the idea of creating emoji fonts, as it is virtually impossible to draw a full emoji set without using color, with browser support still being far from perfect when it comes to color fonts.

I’m not very likely to include emoji as part of the character set in my future fonts. This is partly because of the technical issue: most emoji require or at least benefit from color. No single color font format is very well-supported. Thomas Phinney TypeDrawers

Emoji ligatures

Some of the emojis we’re used to are actually ligatures. With the help of a special symbol that ‘glues’ the ligatures, Zero Width Joiner, multiple emojis with different meanings are transformed into one.

For instance, the female scientist emoji (👩‍🎓) is made up of a woman emoji (👩) and an academic (aka graduation) cap (🎓) emoji. The woman astronaut emoji (👩‍🚀) is made up of a woman (👩) and a rocket (🚀). The full list of emoji ligatures is available on the Unicode website. Since September 2023, the Zero Width Joiner helps control the direction of emoji.

That is, a man with a black cane moving to the right (🧑‍🦯‍➡️) is a ligature comprised of a man, a white cane, and a right-pointing arrow. Before 2023, it was impossible to change emojis’ direction, and an emoji facing one way on Android could be facing the other way on iOS.

Not all platforms and operating systems support this update, and the direction could be changed for not just any navigation emoji. For example, the plane taking off (✈️) still exists only as a right-facing emoji, with this direction being natural only for those who use languages written from left to right — while for those who use, say, Arabic or Hebrew the plane taking off shall be moving in the direction opposite to their reading direction.

Bianca Berning addressed the issue of airplane direction in her emoji font. You can read more about her project on the Alphabettes blog

Skin color emoji

Skin tone emojis are combined characters (technically, they are structured in the same way as accent marks in many typefaces). Hand emojis and face emojis with specific skin color are made up of a basic yellow face emoji and a modifier in charge of a particular skin tone.

That said, skin tones do not exist as separate emojis.

A comic by XCKD

Emojis and spaces

There are no text formatting rules when it comes to emojis. There are numerous posts on Reddit where users discuss such topics as whether you’re supposed to space an emoji from a word or not. It is most likely that coming up with one common rule for all emojis and all fonts is an impossible task.

Noto Color Emoji and Apple Emoji are monospaced fonts, and in such typefaces, the one-piece swimsuit emoji’s 🩱 side bearing is much larger than that of the necktie emoji 👔. Meaning, a necktie-and-shirt emoji spaced from text will end up in the same location as a non-spaced swimsuit.

However, not all emoji fonts are monospaced ones, and the very same emoji might require a space in one typeface and not in another.

Flag emojis

There are hundreds of countries and regions in the world, and this number is ever-increasing. If Unicode were to create a separate code point for each new flag in its character table, the existing flags would take up over 250 code points. That is why Unicode developed an alternative system for encoding flags.

The system features 26 special symbols that visually resemble the letters of the English alphabet placed in dashed boxes. The sequence of two such symbols turns into a country’s flag. For example, the combination of 🇺 and 🇸 is the US flag (🇺🇸). The codes for creating flag emojis correspond to the two-letter country codes according to the ISO 3166-2 standard.

On top of country flags, you can also typeset flags for specific regions. For this end, you need to combine the black flag (🏴) with the two-letter code of a country where this region is located, and the three-letter code of the region itself (it is also available on the ISO standard website). However, regional flags are not supported by some messengers and graphic editor software.

Community flag emojis work the same way as emoji ligatures, but for the flag to work equally well on as many platforms as possible, you should not only add a Zero Width Joiner, but also a special symbol, Variation Selector-16, which prevents the character from breaking into separate emojis. So, for instance, if you want to get a pirate flag, you need to use the black flag (🏴), the Zero Width Joiner, VS16, and a skull and bones (☠️).

The refugee nation flag emoji is available for WhatsApp running on Android. It works the same way as skin tone emojis, made up of a white flag and three colour modifiers (🟧‍⬛️‍🟧). But you have to keep in mind that if you text this to an iPhone user, they will see the emoji sequence like this 🏳️🟧‍⬛️‍🟧.

Emojis in Unicode

Emojis are available in several Unicode blocks. Face emojis expressing the most common moods and emotions, such as sadness 😢or rage 😡, are included in the Emoticons block. Miscellaneous Symbols and Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs contain food- (🍦), clothes-, technology- (💻), animals-, and weather-related emojis (☁️). There’s a specific block for travel and transport-related emojis, Transport and Map Symbols, where you can find a rocket (🚀), a plane (✈️), or a boat (⛵️).

The Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs and Symbols and Pictographs Extended blocks contain people doing sports (🧘🏄‍♀️), hand gestures (🫰🤞), and complicated emoticons (🧐🥸). The Dingbats section includes typographical ornaments and symbols we often encounter as pictograms, such as arrows (➡️).

Boxed letters, numbers, and short words (like 🅰️ and 🆕) are included in the Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement, while the Enclosed Ideographic Supplement block contains kanji characters in boxes (🈳🈯️). The letters that make up country flags (🇺 🇸) are stored in the Regional Indicator Symbols block.

How and when new emojis appear and arrive

Once a year, in September, Unicode publishes a report informing of what new glyphs the standard was complemented with. However, new emojis do not appear on a keyboard right away — it normally happens along with the next operating system update. For example, eight new emojis introduced to the Unicode in September 2024 were not added to iPhone and iPad keyboards until the iOS update in April. The newly arrived emojis are not rendered on devices running on older OS versions.

If you believe that Unicode lacks a certain emoji, you can prepare a proposal on its inclusion in the standard (for example, that’s what the proposal to add a beet emoji looked like). In your submission, you would need to argue why this new emoji is needed and relevant, and indicate the category to which it is to belong to. You also have to attach a color and a black-and-white version of the image. The Unicode website features a separate page addressing how one should prepare and submit a Unicode emoji proposal. Once the Consortium receives your application, Unicode experts will review it and make a decision.