Emoticons

The Unicode Standard version 6 released in 2010 has characters for a variety of emoticons. Apparently these and a great many other additions come from the telephone world of Japan, where they are common on cell phones. I decided to do my version of them when I was updating my picture font Ingy Ding. Here are the results:

 The first three, the smiles and the frown, have been Unicode characters for some time and are at 2639-263B. The others are new, found in the unicode range 1F600-1F640.

More recently I updated a font called AllSmiles, and thought that it might be appropriate to add some emoticons to it. Here they are.

The emoticons at the end are supposed to be cat faces. I have no idea why they are there, but apparently they are in use in Japan.

One of the problems I had in designing these is that because the characters are so new, I could not find any typefaces that had them except for the reference font used by the Unicode Consortium. It is easier to design when there are several different interpretations of a symbol to use as guides.

It is rather interesting how even small changes in position or emphasis changes the impression one gets from these little images. 

What do you see?

I have been playing a lot with various unicode characters recently. (For a result, see Ingy Ding MCD, a font with over 1400 characters.) Among the thousands of symbols with assigned unicode numbers are these three:



What are they?

Sometimes what you see depends a great deal on what you expect to see. What do you see in these symbols? Some people see gun sights or cross hairs. These happen to be unicode characters:
Circled plus ⊕ unicode 2295
Position Indicator ⌖ unicode 2316
N-ary circled plus operator ⨁ unicode 2A01
as they appear on my computer.

The position indicator is meant to show exact location. Given that there is a symbol meant to show exact location, one should not be too surprised to see it used on a map. But there are exceptions, and those exceptions may tell us more about what people expect to see than anything else.

(If you want eliminationist rhetoric on a map, a delete right or a delete left, the ERASE TO THE LEFT ⌫ unicode 232B or ERASE TO THE RIGHT ⌦ unicode 2326 seem more appropriate. As for a gunsight, I think a symbol that looks like a gun sight is unicode 2324 ⌤ The "UP ARROWHEAD BETWEEN TWO HORIZONTAL BARS" or enter key symbols fits.)

A great place to explore unicode other than unicode.org is www.fileformat.info