Status of the old Windows 10 emoji?

[mindplay-dk]

This might be the wrong place to ask, but official Windows support channels generally are a dead end for these sorts of things.

Early reactions on the net to this new set of emoji has not been great - a lot of people are asking how to remove them and restore the old ones, and I would be one of those people.

It's not only a matter of personal taste (I'm an adult and I do not like the overly colorful children's cartoon vibe) but also a matter of communication - the emoji have become part of our written language, and the sudden, drastic change makes them very difficult to decode.

Switching emoji is not as simple as changing a font - letters are abstract symbols, they don't inherently resemble anything, so most people have an easier time abstracting from precisely what the characters look like. Changing the look of an emoji is very different and much more confusing, as these symbols actually illustrate real facial expressions and real-life objects.

Emoji work by mirroring our own facial expressions - imagine you looked in the mirror one day and suddenly your face looked different. Very confusing. It's obviously not that extreme, but we do to some extend mirror our selves in these graphics, and it is very confusing to wake up to Windows 11 one day and find you have to adapt to an entirely new visual language.

I'm sure these new emoji will be very popular with kids, who are generally more adaptable than adults - but for some (many) of us, this change (any change) is unnecessary, confusing and distracting, and we don't want them.

If you had introduced these new emoji as an option, how many do you think would have chosen the old ones?

Bottom line:

Please provide an option in Windows 11 to switch back to the old Windows 10 emoji.

(It's cool that you're building these new ones in the open, but I hope that doesn't mean the old ones go unmaintained.)

[inferno986return]

I would also like the old emoji set with the thick black outlines to be open-sourced. I really like the simple yet effective style they have :-)

[mindplay-dk]

To others looking to switch back to Win 10 emoji on Win 11, I don't recommend it.

I used these instructions and were able to switch back - unfortunately, it looks like the new font is ahead of the old in terms of having more emoji, and the emoji input dialog does not take this into account, so it will display little black squares for newer emoji not present in the old font. (Likewise, every app would display little black squares for newer, missing emoji.)

In other words, the Win 10 version of the emoji font isn't really compatible with the Windows 11 version of the emoji font, and likely isn't being maintained anymore, since they've made the decision to switch - my prediction is, we'll see a Windows 10 update soon that replaces the old emoji.

If the Win 10 emoji are now unmaintained and headed for retirement, I would suggest the following:

Provide an option to switch to Noto emoji, which are dual licensed under Apache 2.0 and SIL.

The option to switch would likely be really helpful to 2.8 billion Android users.

[bhathos]

They really were so far ahead of any other implementation — the degree of care and craftsmanship and high standards it held itself too were very special. Pre-Fluent Segoe recognized the fundamental textual nature of emoji and took it seriously enough to bring actual typographic principles to bear on their design, but they managed to do this without failing to account for those aspects of emoji which make them unique among typographical elements. They were amply expressive, full of character, but at the same time, they behaved like glyphs.

Whoever was responsible for the previous design understood type. They understood legibility and the primacy of the reader and readability, but they also knew the tricks that keep often competing values from becoming a zero sum game. Clever depiction choices led to exaggerations in shape and silhouette that were carefully employed to optimize for the immediate and unconscious distinguishability of glyphs that would be vague stumbling blocks in lesser hands. Glyphs remained distinct even down to amazingly small sizes in many cases, with palette choices contributing similarly to the training of our eyes to register their identities without struggle. The outlining made it the only implementation that even came close to remaining legible against the same diverse backgrounds that surrounding text would have no difficulty with. Case-by-case abstraction trade-offs kept the set heterogenous in precisely the right ways to enable them to not only be seen but read, yet they were somehow also decidedly more stylistically consistent than any their peers, a surprising head-scratcher of an achievement. They didn’t interrupt text because their design was informed by values which allowed them to behave as first-class participants within the text, even constituting it: they were text.

The Fluent implementation is among the best around today, but that’s a bit more of a statement about the present state of ambient standards for craftsmanship in this domain than it is praise. I figure it’ll probably still be quite a few years till the world catches up to the level that the prior design was operating on and appreciates the ways that it raised every bar. I suspect it had the misfortune of arriving “too early” to be appreciated properly as a technological advancement, not just some new “style”. I’m glad to see there are others who saw it, too, though.

I don’t comment this effusively with an expectation that it could lead to a change in Windows or to convince anyone not already convinced of its specialness. Rather I comment to properly thank its designer(s), whoever they were, for both trying and succeeding to advance the state of their craft. Work of that caliber deserves proper acknowledgment from those who noticed even if (or rather, especially if) it was before its time.

I suppose I’m less concerned with whether it finds its way back into Windows (in time, I know “it” will, in one sense or another) and more concerned with whether it finds its way into the Smithsonian, properly credited. I know the real thing when I see it and say as much even if it’s likely to sound silly to most. A friend was able to turn up two names (Mike LaJoie and David Hose), though I’d guess there are more. (Edit: also Judy Safran-Aasen.)

[mindplay-dk]

Whoever was responsible for the previous design understood type

Whoever was responsible for the previous design understood design.

What is the basis of the new design? Who were they designing for? What problem was it intended to solve?

The new emoji remain unreadable to me. They don't resemble emoji on any of the other platforms or devices I use, and I can't discern their meaning. They look like the type of stickers a child would put on their lunch box - but 5 year olds are not a primary user demographic in the Windows user base, are they? So what gives? Someone should take a look at the reality of this design project, call it to a halt, and revert to the previous design.

If there is no problem, there is no solution, and no reason for any design to be done.