Image via Gizmodo.com
Apple's new racially diverse emoji choices may be well intentioned but they completely missed the point of emojis.
Emojis are those little icons we use in text-based messaging to convey emotions such as the smiley face :), sad face :(, or stick-out-tongue face :p. Emojis also convey common concepts quickly - from a bouquet of flowers, a key taking of, to a happy lump of poop.
What emojis are not meant to do is convey literal, detailed representations of physical attributes. Like someone's ethnicity. They are meant to be simple to parse and fast to apply.
Apple had added unneeded and subtle complexity. Six shades of skin tones? Really? So which one am I? Surely we need more than 6 to truly represent the physical world? What about hair styles, eye colour, face shapes, jewellery, glasses... See the problem here?
Adding all these skin tones, and yet still retaining the supposedly generic jaundice-yellow one inevitably leads down the "are you making fun of asians" path. Mixing the figurative with the literal in the same context can get confusing fast. And Emojis are primarily figurative.
Emojis are not profile pictures to represent how an individual looks. Stop trying to make them so. Adding this level of literal physical variation destroys their usability and distracts from the communication intent.
(Hey there aren't enough different cats emojis to represent all the variations - so being so catist Apple... )
