She got on the right track after watching a Mashable story on Snapchat that included instructions on how to propose an emoji. Although Apple has long advocated expanding the diversity of emoji, her request to their customer service department, unsurprisingly, went nowhere. Where to start with an emojiĪlhumedhi, having no clue where to start with her idea, wrote a short note to Apple asking for a hijab emoji earlier in the summer. And that’s not even the end of an emoji’s journey from idea to reality: The individual companies that allow emoji in their operating systems then have to actually design and support them - which is why the same emoji appears differently when sent from an Android phone to an iPhone. It takes a lot of time to get all the way through it, and it’s not exactly intuitive. The process of proposing a new emoji is a complicated slog of written proposal, revision and committee meetings. With the amount of difference in this world, we must be represented.” “However, this does not mean it should stop now. “We applaud Unicode for the diversification of emojis in recent years,” Alhumedhi wrote in her proposal draft. And Unicode said in the summer that it would support about a dozen new “professional” emoji that show men and women working in a variety of careers.
For instance, human emoji are now widely available with the ability to modify skin tone. “Instead, they have been embraced as a nuanced form of expression, and one which can cross language barriers.”Įmoji have slowly started to diversify, in response to calls to make the symbols more representative of the people who use them. “Emojis are no longer the preserve of texting teens,” Oxford said at the time. Oxford Dictionaries argued as much in 2015, when it made the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji its “word” of the year for 2015. “It’s the new language,” Alhumedhi said.Īs emoji-fluent teenagers become young adults, a new visual literacy is weaving itself into the way we communicate with one another online. They are, increasingly, the conversation themselves. Particularly for teenagers like Alhumedhi, emoji now are way more than just a fun decoration for digital conversations among friends. zZvZdeGDsA- Alexis Ohanian September 13, 2016
Proud to be working w Rayouf Alhumedhi + on proposal to add a headscarf emoji.