Looking for 2000's style emoticon set for Discord Messenger

[iProgramMC]

Options considered so far:

• Famfamfam's silk icon set: Very few emoticons

• MSN Messenger: Risky, could cause copyright issues, ~47 emoticons for MSN 4 and 5, MSN 6 and up has blended white background into the emoticons making them unusable

• Apple's emoticon set: Risky, could cause copyright issues, hard to extract from software

• Twemoji and Openmoji: Free and open source, but too new. One of them will probably be used for placeholders.

• SerenityOS emoji: Free and open source, but doesn't look good in my opinion. I'd describe their design as utilitarian.

Requirements:

• Optionally be free of copyright issues
• Have as many emoticons already as possible
• Be relatively easy to draw more emoticons manually
• Has to be 2000's style

Additionally, soon I want to add emoji pack loading, but right now, I'm looking for a default.

[zaafonin]

There's this one which looks really 2000s (a lot of pixel-perfect icons similar to 2000s web design): https://vk.com/images/emoji/sprites/sprite0.png, sprite1.png, sprite2.png

No idea if this is an in-house asset of VK or ripped from somewhere else, so idk about its copyright

EDIT: There are more, I'll try to rip them all today or tomorrow.

[iProgramMC]

Looks good :)

[zaafonin]

Yeah here they are. Looks like a lot of them are rescales of Apple's emojis, but a lot of them are unique.

[iProgramMC]

Yup, a lot of them look Apple-like. Which as I said is quite risky. Especially the humans.

It occurs to me that they started out by ripping Apple's emojis and then creating their own on top. I see a great deal of inconsistency in the flags, for example, the Czech flag is Apple's but Ukraine's flag appears original.

[zaafonin]

Quite the opposite. They drew their own emojis when there weren't as much of them. For country flags, looks like at first they've filled post-Soviet countries + most "known" outside of that

[iProgramMC]

I see. Perhaps I could find earlier versions of these emoji sheets to use that don't use Apple placeholders at all. Where did you get the other ones? (urls) I tried sprite_3.png from the format you gave me but it gave me a blank page.

[zaafonin]

From what I see they changed how sprite sheets are fetched when more emojis were needed. 0, 1 and 2 contain no Apple emojis, but starting from 3 there are some. I suspect they still draw emojis that don't have as many variations, but they've given up on skin tones. I think it's rather easy to eyeball which emojis are Apple's

[rari-teh]

It would probably be way too much work to bring any of these sets up to date, but another option could be Facebook’s original emoji and emoticon set. It covers little beyond the very first Unicode emoji set, though. This website has the full original set. Other possibilities include HTC’s set from 2016, SoftBank’s latest set from 2014 and au by KDDI Type D-3 (2004–2012).

[comdlg32]

stellar from psi

[comdlg32]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tango_icons#Emotes

tango emoticons

[comdlg32]

more tango emotes https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Desktop_icons#Emotes

[comdlg32]

crystal emoticons

https://www.cinnamon-look.org/s/Cinnamon/p/1120232

[comdlg32]

cutemoticons: https://www.pling.com/p/1108677/ icq (probably non-free?): https://www.pling.com/p/1107337/ donanimhaber forum: https://www.pling.com/p/1002209/ twosouls (modified msn, probably non-free) https://www.pling.com/p/1002261/ gadu gadu: https://www.pling.com/p/1002207/ yahoo (probably non free): https://www.pling.com/p/1002264/ meebo (probably non-free): https://www.pling.com/p/1011923/ kde forum: https://www.pling.com/p/1002278/ proticon (this is one of my favorites): https://www.pling.com/p/1012270/ qip (probably non-free): https://www.pling.com/p/1002257/ ipb: https://www.pling.com/p/1108784/ valknut: https://www.pling.com/p/1002236/ cartoon: https://www.pling.com/p/1120523/ amsn (might be non-free? im not sure): https://www.pling.com/p/1112351/ aim (probably non-free): https://www.pling.com/p/1002196/ simple: https://www.pling.com/p/1002213/ kolobok: https://www.pling.com/p/1002303/ qip (probably non-free): https://www.pling.com/p/1002262/ emotikons: https://www.pling.com/p/1120525/ peerweb: https://www.pling.com/p/1002211/ crystal msn: https://www.pling.com/p/1119387/ plainicons: https://www.pling.com/p/1012051/

[zaafonin]

ICQ = Kolobok = QIP. The author even has a kit for creating your own smileys. Its license requires attribution and prohibits commercial use. The whole set is a gem of 2000s internet forums (especially Russian-speaking), but these smileys aren't really related to Unicode emojis (which makes them really unique but hard to fit into modern context) https://www.kolobok.us/download.php?view.67

not in unicode and never will be: https://www.kolobok.us/smiles/user/FALLEN_02.gif https://www.kolobok.us/smiles/user/kattemad_03.gif https://www.kolobok.us/smiles/user/mr47_04.gif

[rari-teh]

These remind me of deviantART’s old emoticons. Same thing, cool and interesting and a little window into 2000s forum culture, but very much in the “emoticons, not emoji” park lol. FWIW they can be found on the Wayback Machine.

[0x5066]

What about the emojis from the SerenityOS project?

[iProgramMC]

Mate, I already wrote about the SerenityOS emojis.

[0x5066]

Oh, whoops 😅

[RF7391]

My solution to this issue: Make it use emoji packs so that we can make custom emojis, it'll help with copyright issues imo

[iProgramMC]

I already thought of that. See the initial comment. But I am looking for a default pack.

[freedom7341]

https://www.phpbb.com/customise/db/styles/smilies-13

Could be some packs of interest here.