Early 2019 Plans

macOS' Font Book, showing my collection of fonts that are installed for this user. The current selected font is a Mutant Standard test font, the demo pane of the window showing the transgender flag and hot shit emoji.
(Don’t mind the glitches on the window, my Hackintosh has been having problems lately. -_-)

Hey! After some research, I managed to (semi) successfully manually compile a Mutant Standard emoji font. This is really exciting!

This was a small test to test my (still incomplete) research though – it only contains two emoji. Like how orxporter recolours and exports thousands of emoji, we need software that can process and put thousands of emoji into a font.

kiilas and I have been talking, and we’re going to work to make fonts in the release after the one I’m working on now.

So with that in mind, I thought I would give a general outline of what we plan to accomplish in the next few months!

A lot of these new updates are heavily related to our emoji production technology, and the new tech will be released to coincide with each new release, so I will list alongside each of these Mutant Standard release in this timeline.

 

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The beginning of fonts

(This is a mirror of the Patreon post of the same name because I realised that relying on Patreon is a bad idea but I didn’t wanna delete that post either)

Hey, I’m starting to get into emoji making some more again, it’s still really hard and exhausting after my burnout in November, but I wanna slowly get back into stuff.

 

Fonts have been a much-requested feature for Mutant Standard. The trouble for us is that it’s not a particularly easy or quick thing to get into.

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Police and Border Patrol emoji – The Mutant Standard view

Continuing with my tradition of making blog posts about why certain emoji that are in the Unicode Standard are not and will never be in Mutant Standard, I have decided to talk about the very first few emoji I decided to exclude – police and border patrol.

With police, I’m mainly bullet pointing this because it’s really depressing and I only have enough emotional energy for one of them, and borders seemed like the better choice because I have my own long personal story.

This is quite a long post and it’s going to go to some dark places.

 

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Why Unicode emoji isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a reliable communication mechanism

I often hear a particular undercurrent of attitudes or beliefs when I hear various discussions about Unicode codepoints and Unicode emoji symbols, and to me, as an illustrator and a designer (ie. a visual communicator), and someone who is trying to navigate their place in the world of languages, I find that these attitudes usually come from a place of privilege, and/or a lack of knowledge about how graphic communication actually works.

I think the notion that Unicode Emoji is something that can be permanent, stable and reliable, doesn’t make sense and isn’t realistic. And even if you could make it that way, that’s not a situation anyone should actually want.

 

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