Honestly, a lot of it also comes down to emojis as a concept just being overall not well thought-out. I recently complained about how they're handled in software, too.
What we need are two things:
- Emoji variations that are selected depending on the background. This would fix many design issues.
- An API to enumerate emojis so that software devs don't need to reinvent the same thing over and over and over again. Applications only need to ship their own emojis because they can't detect if an emoji is available or not. It wouldn't look good if there were Unicode character placeholders in the picker.
It sucks that I want to lash out when people say an emoji I made is hard to see on certain backgrounds, or that they dislike the outline, etc. It's not that they're wrong, but here are the facts:
- I am painfully aware about legibility on various backgrounds.
- Ensuring good legibility on dark backgrounds means using a lighter color. But then the color starts looking too different from what it should be. Crows are black.
- Also side-note: Crows don't glow when you look at them in the dark, so it's actually pretty realistic if the emojis aren't 100% visible on dark backgrounds.
- I'm fed up with restricting my imagination when all the other emoji makers - and I'm talking about the big ones like Google, Microsoft etc - allow themselves to not give a shit all the time. The gray I chose has the same lightness as Noto's blackbird emoji. It is lighter than the gray in various other emojis.
