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    Emoji By The People, For The People

    We give voice to the people about emojis

     

    Emojination wants to make emoji approval an inclusive, representative process.

     

    Our efforts have drawn worldwide media attention through out successful campaigns for the hijab emoji and the dumpling emoji. We also run the highly successful Emojicon conference and fun Emoji Spelling Bee.

     

    Join us! Help us change emoji.

    Sign up for our Slack and Airtable.

  • Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has collected the Hijab and Interracial Emojis for its Permanent Collection

  • Who Controls Emoji?

    (Hint, we want to give the power to you!)

    When we started looking into who could approve our proposal for a dumpling emoji, we were surprised to learn that the emojis – so central to the lives of ordinary Internet users across the globe – was controlled by a handful of multinational American tech corporations.

     

    When you see or send an emoji, that emoji has likely been backed by the Unicode Consortium and approved to be standardized across platforms. Without guidance from the consortium, an emoji created for an Apple device would appear as a jumble on any other device.

     

    So, who gets to vote on whether an emoji is included in that universal lexicon? As of 2021, there are currently 10 full voting members who pay $21,000 a year for the privilege. Seven of them are United States multinational tech companies: Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce and Netflix.

     

    When we started in 2015, the only non-US multinational tech companies who were full Unicode members were the German software company SAP; the Chinese telecom company Huawei; and the government of Oman.*

     

    It can take well over 18 months for a proposed emoji to complete the review process, which includes gaining the approval of ISO, yet another international standards body.
     

    When we started, the decision makers along the way skewed male, white, and engineers. They specialize in encoding. Such a review process certainly is less than ideal for promoting a vibrant visual language used throughout the world.

     

    We wanted to change that.

     

    * Lower membership tiers in Unicode have included the government of India, the government of Bangladesh, the government of Tamil Nadu, and the University of California, Berkeley. Those levels include full and half votes on the Unicode Technical Committee, which oversees emoji.

  • Emoji We've Helped Passed

    A taste of our success stories in collaborating with others

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    HIJAB emoji

    with Rayouf Alhumedhi

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    SAUNA emoji

    with the Finnish government

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    RED ENVELOPE emoji

    with Baidu

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    DUMPLING emoji

    through Kickstarter

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    BROCCOLI emoji

    with vegetarians

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    DNA emoji

    with GE and the American Chemical Society

  • Take Action!

    You too can help create an emoji proposal!
     
    Anyone can submit one to Unicode. We are currently working on emoji for the 2022 release.
     
    Below is a list of Emojination's active ideas, which dozens of people are collaborating on.
     
    Have you yearned for phoenix, sausage, or other emoji? Now is your chance.
     
    Let us know if you want to work on any of these, or you contribute your own idea. We have designers.
     
    Unicode has example submissions on its site, and here is our template. You can join our Slack and Airtable. Basic instructions are here. 
     

  • Contact us

    Are you interested in working on an emoji proposal?

    Contact us below. You can also join our Slack and Airtable.