The trouble with "all yellow for everything" is that the only people who think it's representative of *everybody* are people with light skin. Those with dark skin do not feel represented by yellow. See also: The Simpsons — dark-skinned characters have brown skin, but every white character is yellow.
It's inequitable. It's the veneer of inclusivity. Yellow is useful as a generic colour but it doesn't do the full job.
At any rate, how is it a disaster? In what way has it proven to be destructive? Skin tones is purely additive, all modern OS support it just fine, the schema for skin tone has a fallback on older OS (the same as other emoji combinations), and people get designs that match who *they* are, not who someone thinks they should be.
So because African-americans, the 2nd most represented ethnic group on the planet, don't feel represented, the remaining 500+ ethnic groups who are totally fine with yellow emojis, must have their means of communication colonized by american race science?
This is absolute madness, the whole “inclusivity” idea. Where’s the emoji that represent 2 women shaking hands? Are you saying they’re the same? Isn’t that sexist?
Curious to know why the "White rightwards backhand" is not called "Yellow rightwards backhand", since it's -you know- yellow, not white (or even the pale pink colour that we call white when talking about skin tones.
An artifact of a legacy naming convention which was recently retired. "Black" and "White" indicated fill vs outline.
Example:
"☺️" has the Unicode Character Database name of "White Smiling Face", but this does not refer to the color of the character. This means that when rendered in a monochrome font, it is intended to be displayed using a hollow or outlined appearance.
"☀️" is named "Black Sun With Rays", but this does not refer to the Sun's ethnicity 😝. This character was intended to be displayed with a solid or filled-in appearance.
Interested to know why you went for the full 5x5 matrix, when the 15 solutions on the leading and lower diagonal already represent all the combinations you have? Did you feel it was important which side each colour was on?
It's a good question and I'm tempted to add a screenshot of the UI because once you see it in your keyboard it makes sense, vs seeing the raw glyphs out of context it can feel like WOA A LOT.
When Unicode first added multi-skin tone support user-interface consistency was taken into consideration. In the case of People holding hands (🧑🤝🧑) designers requested the matrix be "filled out" to allow the same skin-tone combinations for differently drawn people so that they are available on the left right, as well as the reverse. Handshake inherited this design pattern. More on that here: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19275r2-holding-hands-zwj.pdf
Go back to all yellow for everything. Introducing skin tone was a disaster and should never have happened.
The trouble with "all yellow for everything" is that the only people who think it's representative of *everybody* are people with light skin. Those with dark skin do not feel represented by yellow. See also: The Simpsons — dark-skinned characters have brown skin, but every white character is yellow.
It's inequitable. It's the veneer of inclusivity. Yellow is useful as a generic colour but it doesn't do the full job.
At any rate, how is it a disaster? In what way has it proven to be destructive? Skin tones is purely additive, all modern OS support it just fine, the schema for skin tone has a fallback on older OS (the same as other emoji combinations), and people get designs that match who *they* are, not who someone thinks they should be.
So because African-americans, the 2nd most represented ethnic group on the planet, don't feel represented, the remaining 500+ ethnic groups who are totally fine with yellow emojis, must have their means of communication colonized by american race science?
This is absolute madness, the whole “inclusivity” idea. Where’s the emoji that represent 2 women shaking hands? Are you saying they’re the same? Isn’t that sexist?
But handshake is an action of 2 right/left hands, not 1 left - 1 right hand.
No, but leftward doesn't mean left.
Curious to know why the "White rightwards backhand" is not called "Yellow rightwards backhand", since it's -you know- yellow, not white (or even the pale pink colour that we call white when talking about skin tones.
TL;DR
An artifact of a legacy naming convention which was recently retired. "Black" and "White" indicated fill vs outline.
Example:
"☺️" has the Unicode Character Database name of "White Smiling Face", but this does not refer to the color of the character. This means that when rendered in a monochrome font, it is intended to be displayed using a hollow or outlined appearance.
"☀️" is named "Black Sun With Rays", but this does not refer to the Sun's ethnicity 😝. This character was intended to be displayed with a solid or filled-in appearance.
Interested to know why you went for the full 5x5 matrix, when the 15 solutions on the leading and lower diagonal already represent all the combinations you have? Did you feel it was important which side each colour was on?
It's a good question and I'm tempted to add a screenshot of the UI because once you see it in your keyboard it makes sense, vs seeing the raw glyphs out of context it can feel like WOA A LOT.
When Unicode first added multi-skin tone support user-interface consistency was taken into consideration. In the case of People holding hands (🧑🤝🧑) designers requested the matrix be "filled out" to allow the same skin-tone combinations for differently drawn people so that they are available on the left right, as well as the reverse. Handshake inherited this design pattern. More on that here: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19275r2-holding-hands-zwj.pdf
Thanks Jennifer, I figured there'd probably be a comprehensive answer!