Emojis are finally more varied and racially diverse. Apple has become the first major tech company to design and create racially-diverse emojis for the latest beta of OS X Yosemite. But what took so long? Apparently Unicode, a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems, felt that the current emoji of a white man was a very simplistic and universal symbol as it is.
Sure, the Unicode Consortium's business is to make sure there's a technological standard so that it will display on as many devices as possible. But the Unicode Consortium doesn't design that character, and when it comes to emoji, it has historically worried about the color of a smiley about as much as it worries about the color of an ampersand or an umlaut. That is, not at all.
We've come a long way when it comes to race integration, desegregation and acceptance of all races... and we've also come a long way in technology and digital communication. So it's a little interesting that we're only just now getting into the design and creation of racially diverse emojis.
Apple's move to introduce racially-diverse emoji into OS X will presumably be followed by adding the capacity to iOS later this year. Curiously, Apple doesn't seem to have replaced the default skin tones of emoji with Unicode's recommended "Simpsons yellow" color, yet, which might be the next big emoji controversy, if not remedied.
via FastCompany
