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.