Didn’t see that one coming. Or the fact that I would be writing about, *sigh*, emojis. Those funny yellow faces were cool maybe 10-15 years ago, when they were popularized by MSN Messenger. Sure they’ve been plaguing our text communications more recently too, mainly because of smartphones and IM platforms, but for some reason, a lot has been happening in the emoji-front in 2015. Let’s take a look:
- Obama’s State of the Union speech in emojis. No one is ever going to read that horrible abomination through.
- A physical emoji keyboard is a thing. Blame EmojiWorks.
- According to Professor Vyv Evans of Bangor University who is studying the “speed of evolution”, emoji is the fastest growing language in UK.
- A company called Intelligent Environments launched emoji alternative to Pin codes.
- Norwegian Airlines had an URL made of emojis. And this is not even the most stupid emoji-related thing to happen this year.
- Instagram made it possible to use emojis in hashtags. Let that one sink in. (But you can’t search for #🍆, because of reasons.)
- To promote Chevrolet Cruze 2016, the company published a press release made only out of emojis. The marketing campaign had a very clever and creative hashtag #ChevyGoesEmoji. Like if that wasn’t enough, they just had to accompany it with this cringe-worthy ad:
- Finland is the first country in the world to launch its own emojis. Total of 24 new emojis will be released in a form of a Christmas calendar, which you can see here: http://xmas.finland.fi/
- Did you know that there’s an official Emoji Subcommitee who works with this stuff? Apparantly they take their work really seriously. This year they designed bunch of new emojis that will be launched next in 2016: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15054r4-emoji-tranche5.pdf
- And as a icing on the cake: Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is 😂. Yes, a frigging emoji. WORD OF THE YEAR IS NOT EVEN A WORD.
Rest assured, I wont be writing this blog in emojis any time soon.
Joel Latto 