It's been a while since I introduced this project!
Mutant Standard is an emoji set that aims to combine familiar, standardised symbols with completely new non-standard ones, aimed at helping particular groups of people (queers and furries in particular) communicate themselves more authentically.
In a similar way to a language, the standard set of symbols that we think of 'emoji' (the emoji keyboards on our devices) are not universal - it's a particular way of seeing the world. Unlike a language, the standards that set what emoji we see in most situations are made by a particular organisation called the Unicode Consortium.
In order to have an emoji in this system, you have to basically petition Unicode to include it in next year's slate of emoji updates. There are both understandable technical reasons why this system exists, but also cultural downsides, namely - you have to ask this consortium, comprised of billion dollar American tech companies, to consider including your thing.
Mutant Standard emerged in 2017 as a project to make emoji that had things I wanted to express myself, and the more I thought about emoji and why I was doing this, the more I thought it would be cool to try to make things that other people would like too. Things that challenge the norms around what emoji are and how we should see them, and coming up with possible new emoji standards.
Mutant Standard (like emoji itself, really) is a work in progress. There's currently more than 1000 unique designs in the project so far, along with some accompanying technical standards. The emoji set is free to use within the CC BY-NC-SA license. You can check it all out (and see all the symbols so far) at https://mutant.tech.
