I think the reason why the others ultimately failed is that I gave myself too much freedom with the 48x48 canvas. 32x32 constantly reminds me of the limitations and a lot of things I did are impossible if I want to stick to the pixel grid.
An interesting idea as an alternative to stickers and custom emojis would be per-post avatars. You know how some blogs have these boxes of a character interjecting with additional notes or explanations, with an avatar showing a specific expression? That.
I'm not bothered by it too much, but it shows why I'm not creating many emojis these days. They're very limiting and I'm not even sure if it's possible to make emojis of a character like Areon. I'll play around with other design variations after work
The allure of stickers over emojis is that I could add all the details, but adding stickers as attachments to 80% of my posts probably wouldn't go over well.
@gwenthekween The visor already has a black outline and a reflection acting as outline against the transparent area adjacent to it. That's the best I could do
Would be quite a shame if the Areon emojis don't work well as emojis, but I can't say I went into this project without that risk in mind. Emojis work best when they're a at least a semi-bright uniform color, which makes and others work very well. Areon is dark, and even with the fur colors made brighter I can't give the visor that same treatment.
@frawst@mist I experimented with light outlines and they don't work. They stand out way more than the emoji content itself which makes them super distracting in dark settings.
@xoagray Stock Mastodon is hell for emoji creators. When I joined fedi, I initially didn't even understand the point of custom emojis because i couldn't decipher any of them
Volpeon 
