Emoji Design Convergence Review: 2018 - 2026

Microsoft making the 📎 paperclip emoji look like Clippy is fun and cute in a way, but I really hate the implications of it. My problem is that emoji are used by people for such a wide array of things that it's not ok to break expectations like this. My mom relies on emoji for marking events in her calendar and acting as icons she can glance at and reference. This is great! But if she were to share some paperclip-marked event with a Microsoft user, they're almost certainly going to be distracted by the unsightly demon and I'm not ok with that.

I really wish there were a better standard for icons in text. Emoji are useful, massively, and their mapping to codepoints is roughly semantic. But they just cannot fulfill the role of general iconography that can be rendered consistently across devices without vendor lock-in.