Google has released a new emoji font pack that attempts to scale things back. The inspiration harks back to a simpler time when the world of communication wasn't as complex and offered a total of only 176 emojis. This is quite a contrast compared to now, with over 3,633 emoji in the Unicode Standard, as of September 2021. To make this a reality, Google had to take its Noto Emoji Color fonts and strip away the colors. Doing so created new problems that the team had to overcome. This is how Noto Emoji was born.
Taking an existing and detailed emoji set and reducing it to its bare lines is no easy task. The team at Google had to take many things into consideration when doing so. For example, how to properly convert the flags of all the represented countries. With the lack of colors, the new stripped-down philosophy posed a problem. The team executed a clever workaround by assigning each country flag with its corresponding ISO code.
Google couldn't find a way to retain the current human character designs, so they took a literal look back and decided to re-introduce its blob emoji that made its debut in 2013. It was still no easy task to convert them into their monochrome counterparts despite the conversion. But what about the oversimplification of some of the more detailed emojis? Google explains that:
By removing as much detail as possible, emoji could be more flexible, representing the idea of something instead of specifically what is in front of you (that … is what your camera is for 😂)
Despite scaling back the look, the font still retains the niceties of modern technology, with users being able to adjust the color, support for light and dark mode, and the ability to drive impact by displaying it in a light or bold format. If interested, you can download the font and take a look at over 3,000 beautiful and simplified emojis.
Source: Google