31 Oct because fuck emoji day, and I felt like halloween was a pretty interesting reference point for some of what Mutant Standard was trying to do. The date orientation also reflects most of the world actually does dates (day-month, not month-day).
Cat smilies are black to express Mutant Standard's commitment to marginalisation with this statistically unpopular cat and also as a reference to it's powerful historic imagery, from witches to anarchism.
Many tech emoji in emoji sets like Apple's influential set are these hokey, 50's americana versions of these devices, or something made to be deliberately unappealing like their beige Fax Machine, which just subconsciously or otherwise feeds into Silicon Valley's ethos of 'new is always better'. People still use faxes and pagers in various places (notably the NHS over here), and they're often doing fine. I wanted to make all my versions functional, recent and relevant.
Similar situation for public transport. Silicon Valley designs are often reflective of how the US sees public transport - icky, old, woefully underfunded. All the designs here are recent, appealing and functional.
The only reason I opted for a very British metro icon was because the circular shape of the deep-level London Underground trains fit snugly into their circular train tunnels. This is not that common in other transportation systems, but it means I can make the train bigger and clearer in the limited emoji space.
There is no universal taxi, but I wanted to try to find something that could be somewhat recognisable while de-centering the US. So this taxi is an amalgam of various non-US sources, including Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and Barcelona IIRC?
I am a city person at heart, I would die in the country. But it doesn't mean I like that the time of day emoji always being a city, even if the Unicode specification doesn't require it. So while for this 'Sunset' emoji, most vendors chose a city, I chose a serene ocean view.
Inspired by iconographic artworks like Xu Bing's Book from the Ground, I decided to break arrows from their container to give them more expressive value and clarity. A couple of arrows are still contained, because the Unicode standard specifically describes them as such.
I'm glad so many people seem to like my take on the robot - once again, I wanted to get out of 50's americana and draw inspiration from my favourite robot concepts from Japan, particularly the Sony QRIO.
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in reply to @cainoct's post:
I love emoji day because their own website shows why it doesn't fucking work - on my phone it's a nonspecific month and no date is highlighted, on my desktop last I checked it was March 21.
I never really liked your black cats though, not because I have a problem with black cats in general but just because it makes the face low contrast so it gets lost more easily if the screen's color reproduction isn't great.
I do think the black cats need more work. Making them both look nice and giving them good contrast has been a challenge. (Probably one of the reasons other vendors choose light-furred cats, lol)
i fucking love the thought behind this. i wish there was a good way to swap out emoji on deivices because i LOVE this
Very thoughtful! I really love your choices. Thank you for sharing these details.
I'd love to hear you discuss how you decide what new emoji to add, if you ever feel like it!
