An exhibition marking the 50th anniversary of Henry Dreyfuss’ influential Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols will debut at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum this spring, highlighting the
CBS News
Illustrating the power of emoji
Most of our communication online is
typed – emails, text messages, Facebook and Twitter. But typing has no facial expressions, no tone of voice. No nuance.
So, maybe it was inevitable that somebody would invent emoji: tiny, typable pictures of faces, things, animals, flags and symbols.
These days, we type 10 billion emoji a day into our online communications. CBS News
Jennifer Daniel is the creative director of emoji at Google, in charge of all the emoji on every Google device, including Android phones. She and her team have drawn all 3,000 of Google s emoji. I do dabble, Daniel said.
The purple hijab emoji. (Lucy Martens)
Emojis help people show emotion in digital spaces but the little, pixelated characters don t always represent the diversity of their users.
And changing that isn t easy, as Rayouf Alhumedhi knows well. At age 15, she campaigned to add an emoji depicting a woman wearing a hijab, the head covering donned by many Muslim women. If there are four emojis to represent four different stages of a mailbox. Why isn t there one to represent half a billion Muslims who wear a headscarf?” she questioned when she presented her case in 2016.
Alhumedhi s story is told in the documentary, The Emoji Story.” She started the campaign to make Muslim women part of the conversation around how they’re represented in technology.