→ Making an Emoji in 90 Minutes

What are Emoji?

Shigetaka Kurita created the first set of 176 emojis for a Japanese mobile carrier in 1999. Emoji is a 🇯🇵 compound word:

• "e" (絵) "picture"
• "moji" (文字) "character"

Emoji isn’t short for emoticon - that’s fake news.

The Unicode Consortium are responsible for standardising and approving new emojis. If Emojis are to help us communicate, there needs to be some governance to ensure they’re represented consistently across platforms.

Each year there’s a new version of Unicode - and you can submit proposals for new emojis. You get bonus points for double meanings, being easy to use in a string of emoji, representing something new and different and being distinctive and iconic.

Guidelines for Submitting Unicode® Emoji Proposals

The goal of this page is to outline the process and requirements for submitting a proposal for new emoji; including how to submit a proposal, the selection factors that need to be addressed in each proposal, and guidelines on presenting evidence of frequency. Follow these guidelines and supporting documents for your emoji proposal to have the best chance of being accepted.

unicode.org

Choosing a Candidate

I chose the humble desk lamp as my emoji candidate - partly because it’s a reasonable choice and partly because I’m looking at one.

Lamps aren’t represented well in the current emoji set. There’s the lamp above the couch 🛋️, the bulb without the lamp💡 and the diya lamp 🪔.

The desk lamp is on the cover of Cal Newport’s Deep Work and that fits. To me it represents study, working at home, working late and informal task lighting. I suspect others feel the same - even discounting for my cultural bias (it gets dark at 4PM in the winter here 🇬🇧).

Desk Lamp Research

The concept of task lighting emerged with the rise of office work and increased literacy. Early desk lamps often used gas or oil as fuel sources. The invention of the incandescent bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879 paved the way for electric desk lamps.

George Carwardine invented the Anglepoise lamp, featuring a new spring mechanism allowing for easy adjustment in 1932. This design became iconic and influenced many subsequent desk lamp designs.

"Luxo Jr." was released in 1986 as Pixar's first short film. It was inspired by John Lasseter’s Luxo L-1 desk lamp.

Head

Base

Arms

Colour

Icons

Simplify

In the simplest of desk lamps - there’s still a lot going on. It’s time to list the components and decide to what extent they’re essential.

Hero → Head

Essential → Base and arm.

Reduce → Hinge mechanisms and the bulb

Remove → Switches, knobs and hardware

Balance Creativity with Standardisation

Using a grid and key-line guide helps with consistency, improves readability at a small scale and helps streamline your workflow.

Iterations 1-12

Designing Out of Context

You can quickly lose perspective if you design out of context. In vector space on a big screen everything is crispy. Dropping the candidate alongside other emoji and it doesn’t perform well. It’s too tall and slender, the components aren’t clear, they don’t dominate the space.

With just a few mm of screen real estate - you have to decide what to include, then exaggerate it to the max.

You can quickly lose perspective if you design out of context. On a big screen, everything looks crisp in vector space. However, when I dropped the candidate emoji alongside others, it didn’t perform well. It was too tall and slender, the components were unclear, and it didn’t dominate the space. With just a few millimeters of screen real estate, you have to decide what to include and then exaggerate it to the max.

Notice how slender object emojis are placed at 45 degrees to fill the square and create more space to emphasise their characteristics.

Before

After

Stopping at Good Enough

After 90 minutes of exploration I’m jumping off here. If I were to pick this up again I’d iterate on the hinges and revisit colours and shading. I’d also setup the grid and key-lines correctly.