faces

Emoji number plates?! Level up your emoji mojo with these 15 nuggets of tasty tips, tricks and trivia about our favourite adorable little pictures.

To state the bleeding obvious, emoji are a thing. In a BIG way. Regular Presto Sketching newsletter readers might know that I have a soft spot for emoji. They’re an amazing, fun and flexible way to express ourselves visually. And emoji are pretty much our main international language; around 95% of humans online are now using these little characters.

So I thought I’d make your day with 15 nuggets of emoji trivia and links. Let’s get into it, shall we?

1. We are sending 60 million of them to each other on Facebook, and 5 billion on Facebook Messenger alone, EV. VER. REE. DAY. Over on Instagram, nearly half of all comments and captions contain emoji, and users from Finland 🇫🇮 are at the top of the table, using emoji in over 60% of text!

2. The most popular emoji (according to this Brandwatch report 📝) are the ‘Face with tears of joy’ 😂 (#1 on Instagram and Twitter), Heart ❤️, Sparkles ✨ and ‘Loudly crying face‘ 😭. And surprise surprise, most popular emoji differ in different countries. France, for example, is rather fond of the wink 😉, but Italy and Spain take it a bit further with a wink and a kiss! 😘

Top 10 most used emojis in the first half of 2021

3. Emoji were invented by Shigetaka Kurita in Japan, and were first seen on Japanese mobile phones in 1999. This interview with Kurita is brilliant, and his first sketches of emojis are absolute gold:

*Shigeta Kurita’s original sketches* for the first emoji set

The original set of 176 emoji now resides in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.🗽

4. Shigetaka Kurita’s favourite emoji? The heart ❤️. Awww.

5. The original smiley 😃 (perhaps the first emoji?) was invented by ad man and graphic designer Harvey Ross Ball in 1963. He was commissioned to create a graphic to raise morale among the employees of an insurance company after a series of difficult mergers and acquisitions. Ball finished the design in less than 10 minutes and was paid $45 for his work 💸.

6. Oxford Dictionaries named ‘Face with tears of joy’ 😂 its 2015 Word of the Year.

7. World Emoji Day is 17 July. Why? Because that’s the date shown on the ‘calendar’ emoji for Apple and Google 📅 (but not for Samsung, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms) And does World Emoji Day have an anthem you can sing along to? Why yes. Yes it does. 🎶

8. Do you want to know what emojis are being used on Twitter? In real time? Of course you do.

9. What about those times when you want to include emoji, but you’re in front of a regular keyboard? Got you covered! Head to getemoji.com or iemoji.com and copy-and-paste 📋 emojis to your heart’s content 👍.

10. Some emoji can have multiple meanings, or different meanings in different cultures. Turns out that this symbol ♻️ means ‘recycle’ in Western culture, but is commonly used for ‘share’ in Islamic ☪️ cultures, like when people post prayers on social media, and encourage others to share. If ever in doubt of the meaning of what you’re sending, best to check using emojipedia.org.

11. Speaking of checking, it’s worth knowing that not all platforms use the same emoji for the same thing, so you might be inadvertently confusing receivers of your messages. For example, the ‘Grinning face with smiling eyes‘ might look like this 😬, or like this 😄, depending on the platform you view it on…. and depending on what you’re trying to say, it could carry a very different tone!

From Investigating the Potential for Miscommunication Using Emoji

12. You can read the entire Moby Dick story in emoji. I can’t wait to see the CliffsNotes of that. 😂😂😂

13. Emoji are being used to evade monitoring and censoring. The Chinese government regularly squashes anything in social media that would appear to be a threat to communist rule, like the growing women’s movement in China. For instance, China’s Twitter-like service Weibo shut down the Feminist Voices account, and then private messaging app WeChat did the same. FYI, Weibo also blocks the #metoo hashtag. But Chinese feminists found a way around it, by using #RiceBunny in its place along with the rice bowl and bunny face emoji. When spoken aloud the words for “rice bunny” are pronounced “mi tu,” a homophone for “me too” that cleverly evades detection.

(Side note: iPhone users in China are missing one specific emoji on their emoji keyboard that shows on all others: the flag for Taiwan.)

14. And what about emoji on number plates? That would be brilliant, if only it were true. As an April fools joke in 2016, the Honda website published a news item that they were introducing emoji number plates in the UK. But hey, you never know… 😉

15. And so, what lies ahead for us in Emoji-Land? If the latest incarnation of emoji and 3D technology are anything to go by, expect more and more animations, face filters, and other facial customisations on your messaging apps and elsewhere. The launch of Apple’s iPhone X brought with it the TrueDepth camera and Animoji, which simply has to be seen to be believed.

It’s worth having a play with these apps, just to get a feel for how your own face can morph into all sorts of expressive, entertaining — and in some cases VERY CREEPY — avatars and whatnot:

💃 Gabsee: Put your 3D avatar in the real world
😮 Mirror AI: Turn your selfie into an emoji
🎤 MyIdol: I had loads of fun creeping out my family and friends with this one… you’ve been warned!

Emoji will be more and more inclusive and instructive

Expect emoji to also bring more of our beautiful diverse world to our keyboards, and therefore to our mindsets. The upcoming Unicode version 11 includes faces with red hair and curly hair, superheroes, more body parts, and more accessories. I think it’s actually good to see a ‘woman’s shoe’ that is flat-soled and blue, rather than the stereotypical (and some might say overly-sexualised) red stiletto heel.

Some new emoji actually take advantage of the way they can transcend language as we know it, especially for people who are illiterate. Earlier this year, Unicode approved the addition of the mosquito emoji, which can be used as a way to better describe mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria and Zika.

And don’t forget: anyone can submit an emoji proposal. What would you submit?

Parting note: use emoji as inspiration ✨in your own sketching

As I’ve mentioned in Chapter 5 of Presto Sketching (Sketching Faces and Expressions), sketching emoji is a great way to broaden the range of facial expressions you can render in your own visual communication. Try copying the emoji that you see on your device today into a notebook, and then try incorporating them into other sketching and visualising you do. Before long, all of your sketches will have a lot more vitality and character! 👋

Life is full of all kinds of people, and your sketches can be too, with these ideas and examples.

Do you want your presentations and business communications to be more inclusive, and show more diversity, but you don’t want to use those cheesy contrived multi-racial stock photos?

Well, help is here! Let’s look at simple ways to sketch diversity in simple figures and faces for your presentations, and other things like whiteboard drawings in meetings, user interface designs, journey maps, and storyboards.

Let’s back up a minute. What do I mean by ‘diversity’? Rather than every figure in your drawing being a white male, I mean showing a variety of figures and faces, in terms of gender, age and life stage, ethnicity and sociodemographic background. This makes your communications much more inclusive.

“Whoah, Ben!” you might be gasping, “That’s a tall order! I can barely draw a figure that looks human, let alone a variety of humans!” Good news – it’s easier than you think. Once you start doing some simple sketches like these (instead of using hilariously bad stock photography), the greater your confidence will be to share them and use them in your own work.

In sketching, detail and diversity go together

Look at the range of faces below. The more abstract a face, the less you need to worry about diversity, but the more detail you add, the more diversity — or lack thereof — will become an issue. Work on a sketching style (or fidelity) that’s got only a little bit of detail; that way, you can suggest diversity in easy, economical ways.

Think about head shape

All of the examples I show you here are using a low level of fidelity; simple lines, no mouths, that sort of thing. This is great for anything from whiteboard drawings in meetings, to slide presentations and design work. Firstly, think about the shapes of the heads you draw. Almond-shaped heads with slightly pointy chins appear more feminine, squarer-shaped heads appear more masculine. Weird-shaped heads appear alien (hey, we’re being inclusive here, right?).

Hair’s the easiest way to variety

Drawing a variety of hair is the easiest way to indicate a variety of gender, age, and ethnicity. The picture below shows how adding just a simple line here and there can indicate things like plaits, a ponytail, or a bun (a man-bun, maybe?).

Once you master those simple lines, try drawing different shapes and varieties of hair as seen below: young spiky hair, long wavy feminine hair, emo hair with a streak through it, permed hair or balding hair. Close-cropped curly hair is also a good way to show someone whose gender is not identified by hair shape.

Beards, facial hair, and accessories like headbands, glasses, caps and other headwear are also great ways to indicate various nationalities, ethnicities, styles, and ages:

Little details mean a lot for different ethnicities and religions

It’s worth investing a little bit of time practising the faces below, so that you can include different ethnicities and religions in your drawings.

Seen here in the top row from left to right: a Sikh turban (the dastar), a Muslim skullcap (taqiyah or topi), two Indian head coverings (chunni), and an Indian woman with a tikka and sari. In the second row from left to right: a Buddhist wearing a Kasaya, an Asian female (the clothing is simple enough to be a Vietnamese áo dài or a Chinese cheongsam), two hijabs (simple enough to be Al-Amira or Shayla style), and a niqab.

Being more inclusive when sketching figures

Just like the faces above, the figures drawn here are really simple. By thinking about different ages and stages (childhood, parenting, older age), we can add a whole lot more variety to the figures we sketch. Here are just a few examples:

Think about different life situations (like parenthood), and different levels of ability and mobility as well.

One thing I like to think about when doing more inclusive figures like this: even if I do a figure with a walking stick or in a wheelchair, I never want that thing to define them as OLD or DISABLED. That’s a stereotype. Instead, I like to include a little detail to show some character in some way, so that they’re not perceived as a stereotype (e.g. old people use smartphones too! A woman in a wheelchair can zip along pretty fast!).

Similarly to the faces you saw, adding a bit of detail to indicate different dress can indicate more inclusivity too (in the case above, the female figure is wearing a sari and maybe a choli).

Your turn

I hope this helps you think about how you might be more inclusive in the way you draw, wherever you draw, and whatever you draw. And I bet you that everyone around you will really appreciate it, too.

Fun emoji facts