Meet the woman who designs emoji for Google

[AriMar]

Caption: A screenshot of different Google emoji faces on Gmail.Have you ever looked at the date on the calendar emoji? Turns out, it’s July 17 which is also World Emoji Day!

📅🗓️📆

World Emoji Day is an unofficial holiday to celebrate how emoji have changed the way we communicate around the 🌏.  

The Keyword (Google’s official blog!) celebrated last week by interviewing Jennifer Daniel, the design manager for Google emoji. (Yes, that is a real job!)

“It is a job, although the majority of my time is spent managing the art team within the ‘Expressions’ group, which creates gifs, camera effects, stickers, and other fun experiences for Gboard, Android Messages, and Pixel,” Jennifer told The Keyword.  

To ensure everyone is represented in emoji, Jennifer and her team at Google surround themselves with experts and ask a lot of questions.

Caption: A screenshot of Gboard that shows the diversity of professional people emoji“Designing emoji (and stickers, and gifs, and camera effects) for a global audience requires a certain level of humility and curiosity about the world,” she said. “As a principle, we want to create images that are iconic and timeless. Stylistically, the more abstract an emoji is, the more you can project yourself onto it. On the flip side, the more detail a drawing has, the more people fixate on how real or accurate it is. Taking detail away from an emoji can offer more opportunity for interpretation and personality, making emoji an extension of your own. I prefer to think of Google’s emoji like words—keep them as abstract as possible.”

Find out what’s next for Jennifer and the rest of Google’s emoji team by reading the full blog post over on The Keyword.

Then, in the comments below, share your favorite emoji.

I’ll start. Mine is 😹. What’s yours?