I guess you mean skeuomorphic, with heightened 3D presence caused by heavy use of light and shadow - roughly, the sort of effect you would get from a static rendering of a cheap 3D model in a Unity mobile game.
I agree with you, although I will say that the current version of the Noto Color Emoji font is (IMO) the best up-to-date color emoji, because it mostly eschews this fake realism that feels uncomfortable and disconcerting in other emoji fonts. I'd prefer hyper-stylized "blobs", but I think they deserve some credit for avoiding the worst of skeuomorphic design.
See for example the "realistic" 3D rendering of the hand on the Apple emoji for "thinking face", it's firmly in uncanny valley for me. [1] The Noto emojis remain fairly stylized without being hideous like the Microsoft emojis.
Google also deserves from credit for drastically improving the rendering of many of these emojis over time. This has happened quietly enough that I doubt most people have noticed. They brought back the more blob-like turtle [2], which really deserves to be compared to the horrible, awkward plastic children's toy that is the Apple rendering. Or take a look at how awful the gradients are on the Android 8-10 emoji [3] and compare to more recent versions. [4]
I think we will look back at awkward 3D renderings in many emoji styles as a mistake. They remind me quite a bit of the terrible DreamWorks animation style [5] of the early '00s.
[1] https://emojipedia.org/thinking-face/
[2] https://emojipedia.org/turtle/
[3] https://emojipedia.org/google/android-10.0/
No, not really; the problem is more, taking things that were originally introduced with the intention of being abstract pictograms signifying emotions; and adding enough un-called-for detail (i.e. details not required by the Unicode codepoint description) as to make things like gender and race seem like a relevant or even necessary property.
Consider: in all modern implementations, "emotion" emoji are displayed with... heads. Opaque backing "vaguely skin-tinted" blobs at the very least; full-on human heads with ears and noses and hair in some fonts.
They don't need to be. Nothing about the Unicode codepoint for e.g. U+1F603 "grinning face with big eyes" says the "face" needs to even be visualized as being on a head. It could be doing a cheshire-cat-smile thing, just eyes and a mouth — ":D" but rotated 90 degrees. And, in fact, that's exactly what it was, in the DoCoMo image-font, one of the three that led to the Unicode introduction of emoji!
But for some reason, now we don't just have skeuomorphism (shiny eyes, pink mouths with tongues, blushing cheeks); we have these heads, and ears, and hair; and before you know it, people wondering why the head is yellow rather than some actual skin tone; or why the increasingly-less-generic face shape seems to be more masculine than feminine; etc.
Why not just cut the Gordian knot? Get rid of the "head" part. Get rid of any part that's not required to communicate the concept. Make an image-font of only the Minimum Viable Pictograms for what each of the Unicode codepoint descriptions describes.
Which is orthogonal to skeuomorphism, mind you. This isn't about whether a tongue has a tongue-ish texture to it. It's about whether you should include a tongue at all.
Okay, one vendor opted to do simpler emoji, but the other two displayed faces, right? Moreover, Japanese carriers don’t have the monopoly on inventing small images expressing emotions. The "Western" world had ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and other IMs (say, Poland’s Gadu-Gadu). And all those had emoticons: typing ":D" would turn into an image of a yellow circle with eyes and a grinning mouth.
And personally, I would prefer the colorful, lively emoji, as opposed to plain punctuation turned 90 degrees. I guess all the current emoji vendors think this way.
Also, I've got an ex-coworker in her late 40's who apparently now types in sentences where the majority of the parts of speech are replaced by an emoji. "Radishes are 'thumbs down' 'vomiting face'" and other statements built with the same grammar. She's an idiot and that was apparent long before this started, but it's gotten worse over the last 4-5 years.
Basically, I'd like to opt out of picture emojis. I'm not sure anything worthwhile has been communicated with them. Well, maybe leave out grandparents. My husband's grandmother isn't a fast typer, so she sends messages mostly made of sweet emojis and you know it's sent with love. But anyone actually trying to make a point with them irritates me. It feels like they're talking like a baby, but in print.
Can people just explain their feelings as they always did in the past, or if that's for some reason not possible, just send a photo or a jpeg of a smiling cartoonish face? Do we really need emojis as they are, sequences of bites that have to be standardized and render correctly on every device and any font?
I just don't get this obsession with emojis. It started as a fun toy, but now it's a huge waste of time for thousands of developers.
But there's no reason that said pictograms need to have a rendering like anything more than what people would draw them as on paper. The Unicode ellipsis exists to encode the separate intent of "writing an ellipsis" from just writing three dots — but it's still just rendered as three dots.
They didn't look good even at the very beginning, and surely doesn't match Apple's design language/principle for.. at least 5 years. Apple is supposed to be the company that is obsessed with aesthetics yet they never update/redo the emojis.
I’ve never used that many emoji in my messages than since I switched to iOS because their emojis carry way more meaning to me.
To be clear, you’re saying that Google’s version looks better?
It also transports the idea of "turtle" better - especially when you deal with people who are unaware of the difference between turtles and tortoises, or who know not all turtles have extraordinary large giraffe-style necks. Not every turtle is a Galapagos tortoise.
Consider what turtles are usually looking like, according to Google Images: https://www.google.com/search?q=turtle&source=lnms&tbm=isch&...
I agree with the sentiment though.
To be clear, I do recognize that the Google one is "stylized" in a way that is not going to appeal to everyone. However, I claim that there is something objectively (or almost objectively) wrong and upsetting about the Apple style here. If you're going to do the whole "3D render" style, you simply have to do a better job than Apple has done here. As I said in my OP, it looks like a poor model from a mobile game or a early 00s DreamWorks film. It's simply not good enough work, regardless of whether you like "realistic" emoji art or not.
Note that Microsoft also had to do a refresh of all their emoji for Windows 11.
For now the Apple/WhatsApp like aesthetic is king. But it’s so fashion driven, you never know what’ll be in tomorrow.
Whatsapp just used Apple's emoji font on android too, for a long time. Eventually they drew their own, often mirrored, versions in the same style.
assume a human is a frictonless sphere. given the skin color "default", solve for emotion rolling_on_the_floor_laughing