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OpenMoji: Open-source emojis

by nameequalsmain on 9/3/21, 1:09 PM with 67 comments

  • by davidjfelix on 9/3/21, 3:21 PM

    FYI: google's are Apache licensed here: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji

    Twitter emoji (discord uses these also) are open source: https://twemoji.twitter.com/

    Both of these are very consistent and good open source emoji. I think in the past a lot of these projects that were not backed by companies eventually devolved into a paid product that was no longer open source, but I'm hopeful that openmoji continues down the FOSS path.

  • by a-nikolaev on 9/3/21, 1:38 PM

    Emojis are normally used inlined in text. So, I think, they should demo theirs the same size as they would be when inlined in text. Otherwise hard to tell tell the emoji quality. I'm also a bit concerned with the thick black outlines, they may look not as good at the small scale (may look too noisy or may overpower small color details).

  • by rincewind on 9/3/21, 2:54 PM

    The last time I evaluated these for use in my app, I found that the "consistent" and "minimalist" visual style makes it really difficult to recognise object/plant/food emoji from one another by shape or at a distance. Other emoji have clear shapes, but not enough internal detail to understand what they mean. this is especially problematic with a set of non-Android, non-Twitter, non-Apple emoji, where users haven't learned the shapes yet, but have to go by looks. It looks like the creators of this project wanted "function over form", or at least "form follows function", but in their pursuit of Bauhaus they accidentally ended up with Droodles.

  • by marcodiego on 9/3/21, 1:27 PM

    From the site: "All emojis are free to use under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license"

    I'd like CC0 better for this case. If anyone is looking for a repository with many CC0 icons (among other licenses), I recommend SvgRepo: https://www.svgrepo.com/

  • by nmstoker on 9/3/21, 1:24 PM

    These are great. Certain interactions are really tough to represent pictographically but they did pretty well from what I saw.

    They've even had a go at the black and white versions of some flags! (but naturally they have a few they need to work on still). Flip the color switch on the link below to see it:

    https://openmoji.org/library/#group=extras-unicode%2Fsubdivi...

  • by Andrew_nenakhov on 9/3/21, 5:59 PM

    In case someone doesn't know emojipedia, here is the link: https://emojipedia.org/

    It covers all existing more or less complete emoji sets,, with licensing information (except for Apple Emojis. Nobody knows what is the license for Apple Emojis and how summer developers get away with using them).

  • by warning26 on 9/3/21, 3:10 PM

    I'm a fan of the artwork in some of the older versions of Noto Color Emoji, which is also open source and freely-licensed.

    But, it's good to have more options in the open emoji field -- if only Apple would freely license their emoji artwork.

  • by carlinmack on 9/3/21, 1:30 PM

    you can see them all a little easier at https://hfg-gmuend.github.io/openmoji/

  • by jokoon on 9/3/21, 2:54 PM

    Sweet!

    I'm making an android game and UTF8 emojis are great for UI icons. I'm currently using the Google Noto one but it's certainly not usable in games.

    I'm waiting for Godot 4 to allow me to display android native emojis from the system font, but I'm not sure yet it will really work.

    I now want to try if I can use this font for my icons, as long as godot allows me to load a font and pick UTF8 character by their codepoint.

  • by woliveirajr on 9/3/21, 2:00 PM

    > OpenMoji is an open-source project of 50+ students and 2 professors of the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd (Design University) and external contributers.

    Congrats to everybody for taking time and giving us those emojis.

  • by dec0dedab0de on 9/3/21, 5:51 PM

    for a while I've been thinking that it would be cool if emojis were directly in the font, so that they changed style to match the font being used.

  • by collegeburner on 9/3/21, 1:33 PM

    No pregnant man emoji, 0/10 literally unusable

    On a more serious note, what are the author's plans to extend it? I saw that it's a project, so will it keep growing or is it pretty much done?

  • by bkyan on 9/3/21, 9:02 PM

    Could these be turned into an @font-face for use on websites?

  • by TheRealNGenius on 9/4/21, 4:03 AM

    They don't particularly suit my tastes. Perhaps amateurish compared to other notable open source emojis.

  • by epilys on 9/3/21, 2:15 PM

    The font files are very big (~10MB). They need some trimming before they are viable to use on websites.

  • by matt_s on 9/3/21, 2:29 PM

    Unicode has emojis[0] which are freely usable for nearly every device as far as I understand.

    What is the purpose here? How much overlap?

    [0] https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

  • by wongarsu on 9/3/21, 2:23 PM

    They even include a number of that aren't in Unicode (yet?), like this Trump emoji [1]. They are allocated in the Private Use Zone of Unicode, so there shouldn't be any collisions with future unicode additions.

    1: https://openmoji.org/library/#emoji=E183

  • by aidenn0 on 9/3/21, 9:41 PM

    This hasn't caught up to the change in presentation of the pistol emoji: the version presented clearly depicts a revolver:

    https://openmoji.org/library/#emoji=1F52B

  • by user-the-name on 9/3/21, 1:46 PM

    The fact that everyone's head is cut off is kind of creepy.

  • by mcdonje on 9/3/21, 3:45 PM

    Generally, I really very much like the style. I wonder about the skin tones and inclusion. I only see yellow supported.

    There's an argument to be made that just having 1 unrealistic color could be more inclusive than many skin tones, but the characteristics of the people look white in general. Like, even the curly haired person. They just look like white people. I'm white, but this doesn't seem very inclusive.

    Is there a skin tone variant I'm missing?