The Process of Proposing New Emoji

The Verge has an interesting interview with Paul Hunt, a type designer at Adobe, who has proposed four emoji that have been adopted as part of the Unicode Standard: orange heart, child, adult, and older adult. In addition to describing the extensive research that can go into proposals to adopt a new emoji, Hunt explains the Unicode body’s approach to issues surrounding the diversity of emoji and inclusiveness:

… Unicode tries to be very sensitive and tries to avoid any kind of political issues when it comes to coding new characters. I think that Unicode doesn’t really try to give a voice for particular causes. Instead, they try to approach it in a way that they try to make tools for communicating existing realities. … I feel like having more emoji concepts to express issues around gender and around equality issues is only a good thing. Hopefully as people use and see these emoji, then it will help them to hopefully be able to think and empathize for the people who are using them.