Google's Emoji 15.1 Support In Noto Color Emoji
Today Google has officially unveiled its full-color designs for Unicode's latest approved emojis, which include a phoenix, a lime, smileys shaking their heads up and down, and a series of direction-specifying people emojis.
Today Google has officially unveiled its full-color designs for Unicode's latest approved emojis, which include a phoenix, a lime, smileys shaking their heads up and down, and a series of direction-specifying people emojis.
These new designs have been uploaded to both Google's Noto Color Emoji Github page and their Gstatic servers.
Additionally, today's update also changes several emojis' previous Google designs, including all previous-released family emoji designs.
Today's emoji update is expected to be released progressively across different Google platforms such as Chrome OS, Gmail, YouTube, and various Android devices over the coming days, weeks, and months.
It is also expected that the downloaded font file of this updated version of the Noto Color Emoji set will soon be made available via its Google Fonts page.
Noto Color Emoji's minimalistic companion font - Noto Emoji - was quietly updated back in September following the formal approval of Emoji 15.1 to include support for all of its new emoji sequences. It can be downloaded via its own Google Fonts page.
Note that the Noto Emoji font does not support distinct designs for skin tone modifier sequences and many gender-specifying ZWJ sequences. Instead, it displays the same design as the base neutral emoji: either a blob or a humanoid silhouette.
🆕 New
The 118 new emojis in today's Noto Color Emoji can be categorized as follows:
- Six are brand-new emoji concepts,
- Four are new non-gender-specifying family emojis with a silhouette-based design,
- 108 are new direction-specifying versions of six different people emojis.
Amongst the six brand-new emoji concepts, two are within the Smileys category: a 🙂↔️ Head Shaking Horizontally and a 🙂↕️ Head Shaking Vertically. There are also two new additions to the Food & Drink category -a 🍋🟩 Lime and a🍄🟫 Brown Mushroom - as well as a 🐦🔥 Phoenix and a ⛓️💥 Broken Chain.
There are also four brand new non-gender-specifying family emojis within this update, each with a silhouette-based design as per Unicode's recommendations.
- 🧑🧑🧒 Family: Adult, Adult, Child
- 🧑🧒🧒 Family: Adult, Child, Child
- 🧑🧒 Family: Adult, Child
- 🧑🧑🧒🧒 Family: Adult, Adult, Child, Child
The remaining 108 emojis are gender- and skin-tone-based variations of six previously-released people emojis. These new additions specify a direction for these emojis, with each of them now facing to the right.
- 🚶➡️ Person Walking Facing Right
- 🏃➡️ Person Running Facing Right
- 🧎➡️ Person Kneeling Facing Right
- 🧑🦯➡️ Person with White Cane Facing Right
- 🧑🦽➡️ Person in Manual Wheelchair Facing Right
- 🧑🦼➡️ Person in Motorized Wheelchair Facing Righ
🆙 Changed
All of the previously-released 👪 Family emoji variations now have a silhouette icon design, matching the new non-gender-specifying family emojis from Emoji 15.1 that have been released in this update.
This change is illustrated via the 👨👩👧👦 Family: Man, Woman, Girl, Boy emoji below.
EDITOR'S NOTE: An earlier version of this article described a change to the 🫥 Dotted Line Face emoji within Google's Github upload. Google did not intend this change to be the case and quickly reverted the design to its previous design.
💻 Release
As discussed above, these new and updated emoji designs have been released via Google's Noto Emoji Github page, meaning they are likely considered final and will not undergo further revisions before release.
These new and changed designs are therefore expected to be released progressively across different Google platforms such as Chrome OS, Gmail, YouTube, and various Android devices over the coming days, weeks, and months.