Transitioning to new emoji

Our original emoji style was simple and flat with bold pops of color. The flat design became Android’s signature style, differentiating us from other platforms.

Over the years, as additional emoji were added across all of the categories, the set became stylistically divergent. Our design system wasn’t equipped to to provide standards that unified the look and feel of all the illustrations across the many emoji categories. As a result, our emoji became inconsistent between old and new designs, making it difficult to quickly scan the keyboard to find the right emoji.

It was time for a change.

We changed the animal set from a variety of styles to a single unified look for heads and bodies alike.

Creating a new design system

Learning from past experience, a central theme of our redesign had to be a strong design system that made it easy to create an easily identifiable emoji style. In addition to a unified style, the system had to help us stay consistent and vibrant as new emoji were introduced in the future.

By formalizing the shape, grid, representation, and color, we were able to unify the set while retaining expressiveness and character. By creating a strong design system we also addressed a major shortcoming in our old style, and we enabled the emoji to be created by more than one illustrator while remaining consistent, legible, understandable, and representative in any context.

Shape system

Bye bye blobs! Hello emotive squishy circles.

Yep, we did it. We said goodbye to the blobs. We moved away from the asymmetric and slightly dimensional shape of the container to an easily scannable squishy circle, relying on bold color, purposeful asymmetry — such as the new mind-blown emoji or the prop-wearing cowboy emoji — and loud facial features to convey emotion.

We also spent a long, long time making sure that we addressed cross-platform emotional consistency. Because one of our main goals with the redesign was to avoid confusion or miscommunication across platforms, we wanted to assure the user that when they sent an emoji to a friend, the message was clearly communicated regardless of whether they are on iOS, Windows, Samsung, or any other platform.

Grid system