Regarding future redesigns

[Swagsy]

Dear developer,

after thorough discussions and future-oriented predictions, in favor of platforms such as Discord, the user base has voted on keeping the already-existing, standard yello face emojis as they are and not become a subject to change, as seen with the recently 2 updated ones. We respect the 2 recent changes, but with all due appreciation, we would not like to see more alternations of the classic twemojis in future releases. We thank you in advance.

~"Dont't break what isn't broken"

Much Love, The People Of Discord

[infini0083]

Respectfully, i agree with you Swagsy.

[NurMarvin]

Whilst I think there is no harm in change, it would have at least been nice to have a vote on this or something. There is a lot of people attached to the classic pleading emoji and considering this is no longer a corporate project, it would have been great to involve the community when making this change. Yes, there was an issue on the original repository but the change was then pushed without taking any community feedback.

[Compwnter]

bad day for femboys (their beloved pleading emoji got removed) jokes aside im glad that the classic yellow face emojis wont change

[smiba]

I'm joking a little while I say we lost an icon, but I genuinely preferred the older pleading face emoji and I'd love for it to stay around.

[Woofer21]

I personally prefer the 2 new ones, they look cuter and hope to see more follow suite. This is a good change, not a bad one.

Much Love, The People Of Discord

However, I do not think it is appropriate to lump all discord users behind that sentiment, as you are just one person and can not speak for everyone.

[micenest]

However, I do not think it is appropriate to lump all discord users behind that sentiment, as you are just one person and can not speak for everyone.

That is not to mention it makes you look borderline embarrassing, to say the minimum.

As for the emotes themselves: I can see why a poll or something of the type for those updates would be welcoming - considering this is still, somewhat, a community project. However, do keep in mind that the initial changes to those symbols were done in order to comply more in-line with the existing set that everyone is already familiar with, and to also fix some overall alignment issues as well.

It was not an issue of "Don't Break what is not broken". People just make it look like as it was since they got used to the incorrect.

[catgirldoll]

Nobody I'm aware of in issues / PRs asked for a redesign of the pleading face emoji, and general discourse online in my circles has been a negative reaction to its change.

I'm aware it is now more in line with pleading face emojis from other vendors and is also more consistent with other Twemoji, but its old version had unique uses which had become widely (not small-niche) popular in Gen Z circles (and some Millennial circles) to communicate a sense of neediness in a way which is no longer communicated by the new version of the emoji.

A possible solution may be to redesign pleading face to look up in a similar manner/degree to its Twemoji 11.0-14.0 version, but with pupils (and possibly eye shape?) which are cohesive with the newer style.

Would also love to see (per-emoji) polls in the future regarding changing existing emojis, as this is now a community project rather than a corporate one.

[catgirldoll]

Thoughts on this as a compromise? It's looking up similar to the old

(already run through optimization, can submit a PR if people here want) Critique is welcome and appreciated, and this one will try to iterate on the emoji based on that!

[Woofer21]

Thoughts on this as a compromise? It's looking up similar to the old

Honestly the current one looks better, I don't think it needs to change in any way.

[Ernest314]

It's been pretty much the standard for emoji implementations to move towards standardized representation, and that's the official position of the Unicode emoji sub-committee (Jennifer Daniel has some writings on this topic, but unfortunately I can't find the exact article I'm looking for atm.) The rationale is that this reduces potential for miscommunication, and that people expect their emojis to look a certain way. People don't think of 💃 as "dancing woman" (although the prescriptivist in me thinks they really should), they think of it as "a lady in a red dress making that specific pose".

I fully agree with the less popular position that emojis should be varied and should be used to convey semantic meaning, rather than be used as pictographs, but there are also very real benefits to unifying how they look. And these benefits cannot be achieved unless everyone standardizes.

I mentioned Jennifer Daniel earlier; in addition to being the chair of the emoji subcommittee, she was also the designer behind Google's iconic blob emojis. But even she changed her mind on this topic and has decided to go in the direction of standardization. Some examples of other emojis that follow this trend: Face with hand over mouth and face with spiral eyes. But a lot of other work indicates this general direction too--the filling out of the color space for colored hearts with light blue / pink / white hearts was partially motivated to even out those colors, and to bring different platforms closer together. The current effort to add "direction indicators" to emojis like trucks/cars etc. is also motivated by the same concept.

My point is that this isn't an arbitrary "preference" thing, and that there is a lot of thought that went into these changes. Even though I disagree, this is the direction that Unicode has chosen. And it's not all bad, and besides, Discord has the convenient workaround of simply using custom emojis, which very few other platforms have.

[bignutty]

Nobody I'm aware of in issues / PRs asked for a redesign of the pleading face emoji, and general discourse online in my circles has been a negative reaction to its change.

A request to make the face holding back tears emoji fit in more was opened in September of 2022, with somebody mentioning that the regular pleading emoji should also recieve an update in February of this year.

Would also love to see (per-emoji) polls in the future regarding changing existing emojis, as this is now a community project rather than a corporate one.

I'd argue the whole "poll" concept wouldn't work, similar to how nobody replied with any feedback regarding "please dont redesign this emoji" on the issue I mentioned above. People have a tendency to only check these things once something has happened, not in advance (and in the case that they do notice in advance, its much more likely for those that disagree with the change to tell their friends to vote no on it instead of it being a vote where the larger user group is affected). I have to agree with Ernests comment here that emoji designs should be more universal across suppliers and not arbitrarily made in order to look as unique or different as possible (leading to potential miscommunication).

[boywithkeyboard]

I don't know about you, but 22+ thumbs up in https://github.com/twitter/twemoji/issues/563 seems like a pretty strong vote for a redesign to me.

[smiba]

I don't know about you, but 22+ thumbs up in twitter#563 seems like a pretty strong vote for a redesign to me.

22 votes on a emoji-set used by 100M+ people daily is statistically negligible, especially considering those who have an issue with an emoji are significantly more likely to go and look for the issue then those who are happy with it.

To note, this is also on the issue for the holding back tears emoji, while most people have an issue with the contextual change of the pleading face emoji. Wheres the emoji could previously correctly express "neediness" while also not distorting the original intention "pleading", it is now entirely incorrect in a "neediness" context

I would agree with the change if previously this would create a misunderstanding (such as the "Face with hand over mouth" emoji that looked shocked on Apple devices, but laughing on others), but the previous emoji was unlikely to be confusing for the recipient regardless of platform and emoji set used by the original sender. This effectively means the usability of the emoji has been reduced

[boywithkeyboard]

You also should note that this repository is effectively maintained by 2 people, so your assumptions are not quite realistic.

[smiba]

You also should note that this repository is effectively maintained by 2 people, so your assumptions are not quite realistic.

How is this remotely relevant to the discussion? If you can't have a sensible argument I'd prefer if you'd stay out of the discussion to prevent clutter. Enough projects are (primarily) maintained by a small set of people, but used by a wide audience, this is no argument to ignore community concerns or disallow discussion about changes.

Saying that only 2 people maintain this repo significantly undercuts the hundreds of people who've done valuable contributions to the emoji pack as well...

[boywithkeyboard]

@smiba if you can't cope with other people sharing their opinions that don't align with yours, I suggest you don't engage in any discussion.

I think I may have overlooked the fact that Discord already uses this fork of Twemoji. Anyway, imho I don't think you can please every single member of the community, there are always people who don't like an addition or change, but that's just how the world is.

I also don't think @sofodesign will redesign every single emoji, if at all he will just fix small flaws, like with these 2 emojis now. If the original pull request hadn't gotten so many upvotes, this change wouldn't have happened in the first place.

[boywithkeyboard]

I don't know about you, but 22+ thumbs up in twitter#563 seems like a pretty strong vote for a redesign to me.

22 votes on a emoji-set used by 100M+ people daily is statistically negligible, especially considering those who have an issue with an emoji are significantly more likely to go and look for the issue then those who are happy with it.

To note, this is also on the issue for the holding back tears emoji, while most people have an issue with the contextual change of the pleading face emoji. Wheres the emoji could previously correctly express "neediness" while also not distorting the original intention "pleading", it is now entirely incorrect in a "neediness" context

I would agree with the change if previously this would create a misunderstanding (such as the "Face with hand over mouth" emoji that looked shocked on Apple devices, but laughing on others), but the previous emoji was unlikely to be confusing for the recipient regardless of platform and emoji set used by the original sender. This effectively means the usability of the emoji has been reduced

Yeah, but how many of the 100M+ people using it daily actually take part in the development of it? Not even 0.1%!

[Irismono]

Gonna toss my two cents in as far as the redesigns go:

The holding back tears emoji was in fact pretty cursed. The redesign feels weird though, with the eye color being the main culprit as far as I can tell. Most emojis have brown eyes, so the black/navy blue looks really out of place.

The pleading emoji change is causing the bottoms I know to have a series of existential crises. Eye color again looks to be the main culprit, since the black just looks out of place next to the brown of everything else. Eye direction is also somewhat of an issue, the upward glance of the old version looked especially pathetic, which was (best as I can tell anyway) part of the appeal.

If all the emojis are being changed to black/blue that's okay, but as it currently stands the difference between the almost entirely brown features of the current set and the navy of the two new icons is off putting. My preferred solution would be to keep the brown, as that's one of the hallmarks of the set as a whole. I'm only one person though, so take whatever action you deem best.

Also to those reading the thread, the 22 (now 25) thumbs up on #563 are specifically in relation to very cursed holding back tears emoji.

[Omoeba]

I very much disagree with this issue and think both updated emojis are a big improvement. Changing just the "face holding back tears" emoji and not the "pleading face" emoji will make "pleading face" not only inconsistent with other implementations but also Twemoji itself. I understand your personal objection with this change but claiming to speak for the entire user base of Discord with a "vote" that never occurred and signing your message with "The People of Discord" is incredibly disingenuous.

[theotheroracle]

would love if the pleading emoji still looked upwards lol

[hf02]

I feel like reverting the emoji's appearance for Discord's culture specifically feels like overreaching. They aren't the only platform using Twemoji.

[smiba]

I feel like reverting the emoji's appearance for Discord's culture specifically feels like overreaching. They aren't the only platform using Twemoji.

I don't think it's limited to discord's culture, but considering discord is a massive platform it will probably be the biggest group of users affected

[hf02]

I don't think it's limited to discord's culture, but considering discord is a massive platform it will probably be the biggest group of users affected

Maybe, but when I'm using Twemoji for a project, I want the emojis to look good. I don't want an emoji that looks bad because of its meme status.

That's why I feel like it's overreaching. Sure, Discord may have the largest group of users involved, but it's still specific to a single entity. In that case, I think they should just fork it and readd the old emojis.

[theotheroracle]

i dont think the emoji should be reverted, if definitely looks better now, but a comprimise like @catgirl-doll proposed would be good

[Irismono]

I'd be happy with @catgirl-doll's proposal assuming the eye color was changed to brown, to match with the majority of the existing set.

Also as far as response from Discord users goes:

• Holding back tears appears to be mostly positive. A few people miss it due to its ugliness being considered a feature, but all in all it's considered more usable. Found a reddit post with 1.1k upvotes praising the change. It's close to the top of controversial though so... I'm not fully sure what to make of that.
• Pleading seems more mixed. Some people think it looks better, some people think the new version is the devil. Found two posts with around 600-800 upvotes, both questioning the change.

For my own part, the eye color looks wrong, but otherwise the new versions are okay.

[boywithkeyboard]

@Irismono can you share a link to the threads you're mentioning?

[boywithkeyboard]

The emoji shown in the following tweet might align better with the other ones:

https://twitter.com/luciascarlet/status/1641006053474140164?s=20

Edit: That's actually Twitter's new internal version of Twemoji.

[Irismono]

@boywithkeyboard sure: 1.5k supporting the holding back tears change Just under 700 demanding a reversion 770 noting the change, comments are mixed.

[Omoeba]

The emoji shown in the following tweet might align better with the other ones:

https://twitter.com/luciascarlet/status/1641006053474140164?s=20

Edit: That's actually Twitter's new internal version of Twemoji.

This seems like the worst of both worlds since the mouth makes it even more inconsistent with other platforms and the eyes do not placate those who want the old version back.

[Crissov]

Current design:

[catgirldoll]

I'd be happy with @catgirl-doll's proposal assuming the eye color was changed to brown, to match with the majority of the existing set.

Where whites are visible, eye colors are inconsistent in Twemoji. For example, face with rolling eyes has brown eyes, whereas flushed face, winking face with tongue and zany face have black eyes. There does need to be some standardization across this, though currently black does appear to be the more common color in such cases.

That said, here's what your suggestion would look like:

(edit: optimized SVG file size)

[pinobatch]

Completely apart from the neediness/bottom aspect of the direction of the pupils:

There were theories in some servers that the eye shape changed to look less like Precious Moments products. Was that a factor?

[Cassumbra]

That said, here's what your suggestion would look like:

i think this definitely looks better than the current design it conveys the same idea as the old one i think i still prefer the old one though? but i could probably be happy with either

i think treating the two redesigns as a package deal is definitely a negative changing holding back tears is supportable, but changing pleading is out of the question whereas one is.. horrifying to look at- the other is iconic the emotion the two convey now is just way too similar and pleading conveys way too different of an emotion now its not that a servicable redesign of pleading is impossible, it just seems poorly executed and unnecessary (in the iteration that we are using today)

[wdym-lmao]

Thoughts on this as a compromise? It's looking up similar to the old

(already run through optimization, can submit a PR if people here want) Critique is welcome and appreciated, and this one will try to iterate on the emoji based on that!

Sorry for taking your SVG file without permission, but I fixed some of the issues that I think your version has, such as the black pupils and the lack of eyebrows, and moving the face downwards.

[catgirldoll]

Sorry for taking your svg without permission, but I fixed some of the issues your version had, such as the black pupils and the lack of eyebrows, and moving the face downwards.

The svg doesn't contain any new assets, and was posted here to be used or adapted. No worries! That said:

The pupil color is only debatably an issue, as brown and black eye colors are inconstent between released Twemoji; both in jdecked's fork and the official Twitter published pack.

The lack of eyebrows and the face being tilted upwards are intended to be evocative of the old design, as they convey a similar emotion while being more in line with the present art style than the defunct 14.0 pleading face emoji.

Just like the currently used pleading faceemoji, your version loses the feeling the defunct emoji conveyed, but unlike the currently-used emohi it is not fully in line with the look and conveyed emotion of other vendors' pleading face emojis, which will likely not satisfy parties in either camp.

[Irismono]

The eyebrows being present is a subtle downgrade as far as I'm concerned. They move the expression more towards hopefulness or confusion than begging.

I'd personally argue that the eye color is better brown. If I had graphic design skills beyond MS Paint scribbling I'd offer to go through and update the existing set to be more uniform. My observation has been that the discrepancies are on less commonly used emoji, which is likely why they haven't been addressed.

[Crissov]

I’d suggest to specify a ZWJ sequence for the legacy design, but then – they’re really very similar.

[elephantpanda]

What's the big deal. Surely the intelligent solution is to create a folder called: "legacy emojis" and put the old ones in there. Then everyone wins. No need to erase emojis from history 🙄

[smiba]

What's the big deal. Surely the intelligent solution is to create a folder called: "legacy emojis" and put the old ones in there. Then everyone wins. No need to erase emojis from history 🙄

I don't think anyones concern is history related, just the change itself. Having a legacy emoji folder is probably even worse, you can always catch the old ones from the git history and this would create an even bigger divide as this would also split Twemoji.

Restoring it might still be the best choice, but @bsoap-cat 's edit is pretty good too, although I'd probably leave out the eyebrows. Still doesn't work as well as the previous one, but if this is the compromise that can work I'm ok with that :)

I’d suggest to specify a ZWJ sequence for the legacy design, but then – they’re really very similar.

You'd have to ask the Unicode Consortium

[Crissov]

ZWJ sequences are not required to be RGIed by Unicode.

[smiba]

ZWJ sequences are not required to be RGIed by Unicode.

Of course, but it would be even further out of line for twemoji to just introduce their own new sequences, not knowing if they suddenly will be in use in the future.

Using a free sequence without reservation from the Consortium is foolish

[elephantpanda]

We must obey the Consortium. Long live the Consortium. O7 🖖

[wdym-lmao]

What's the big deal. Surely the intelligent solution is to create a folder called: "legacy emojis" and put the old ones in there. Then everyone wins. No need to erase emojis from history 🙄

I don't think anyones concern is history related, just the change itself. Having a legacy emoji folder is probably even worse, you can always catch the old ones from the git history and this would create an even bigger divide as this would also split Twemoji.

Restoring it might still be the best choice, but @bsoap-cat 's edit is pretty good too, although I'd probably leave out the eyebrows. Still doesn't work as well as the previous one, but if this is the compromise that can work I'm ok with that :)

I’d suggest to specify a ZWJ sequence for the legacy design, but then – they’re really very similar.

You'd have to ask the Unicode Consortium

thx, but the version without eyebrows was made by @catgirl-doll. I added eyebrows because I thought it looked good.

[roytam1]

regarding redesigns of emojis in rev dbb2a10530, I found that they're not twemoji-colr friendly. (reported in https://github.com/jdecked/twemoji/commit/dbb2a105307932399402c5333001e82ba67af016#commitcomment-124376242 before)

[wdym-lmao]

Thoughts on these designs?

New features:

• (U+1F979-U+1F97A) Bigger pupils
• (U+1F979-U+1F97A) Fixed white shine on pupils
• (U+1F979-U+1F97A) New mouth and eyebrow designs
• (U+1F979) Tears to match other vendors