Mutant Standard Blog

Mutant Standard 0.4.1

This update brings new emoji, emoji improvements, bug fixes and updates on the experimental fonts introduced last version.

New emoji

Hoof hands, neurodiversity symbol, road vehicles, places and many more! Show your allegiance to Big Soy with the new tofu emoji!

Updated emoji

Showcase of some of the emoji improvements in Mutant Standard 0.4.1.

As part of ongoing efforts to upgrade the aesthetics of old emoji, even more emoji have been updated. Beefier muscle emoji, bigger punches, better bugbears, punchier gender symbols, improved colours, outlines and more.

Improved Fonts

Fonts have been improved and changed around:

Improved sbix font that should work more seamlessly.
SVGinOT format has been depreciated. You should use the sbix font instead; it should work wherever SVGinOT works.

Fonts are still experimental though, and I can’t vouch for how much you’ll be able to use them, but the new sbix fonts generally have better stability and compatibility compared to the last version.

Yep, it’s still a big release

I’ve still done a big release at the moment despite still (kinda?) having the intention to work that out because I still haven’t figured out I’m going to automate things. At the moment, just making stuff and releasing it at a particular moment in time feels less stressful than working out and testing newer workflows, so I’ve gone with the path of least resistance ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Full changelog:

New emoji

New palms_up expression for all MMs
neurodiversity symbol and infinity
all-new hoof hands (12) and hoof hand modifier
car, suv, taxi, minibus, ambulance, delivery_truck, articulated_truck, construction_sign, siren, bus_stop
light_bulb, soap
sunrise, sunrise_over_mountains, national_park, foggy, moon_viewing_ceremony
card suits (4), dollar, currency conversion
steam_train, mountain_train, briefcase
enby_crossbow
mild_panic
cookie, pizza, egg, tofu, avocado

Visual Changes

Updated Muscle expression (for all MMs)
Updated punch for hmn and claw MMs.
Rounded outlines for fist_facing_left, fist_facing_right, writing_hand, pray and nail_varnish for all MMs.
Slightly improved massage emoji
Slightly improved privacy emoji
Improved symbol flag emoji
Updated dice colours
Updated office/stationery emoji
Adjusted money emoji colours
Adjusted tech 2 emoji colours
Improved earth and world map emoji
Improved beach and desert_island emoji
Updated gender symbol designs
Updated bugbear design

Bug Fixes

Fixed an error from 0.4.0 where the lightness of H1-H5’s text descriptions were accidentally flipped.
Fixed a visual bug in volcano.
Fixed an outline gap on nail_varnish [paw]

Codepoint changes

snake assigned Unicode ‘Snake’ (U+1F40D)
leopard assigned Unicode ‘Leopard’ (U+1F406)
ram assigned Unicode ‘Ram’ (U+1F40F)
rat assigned Unicode ‘Rat’ (U+1F400)
rabbit assigned Unicode ‘Rabbit’ (U+1F407) (not to be confused with Unicode’s ‘Rabbit Face’)
tiger has been moved from Unicode ‘Tiger Face’ (U+1F42F) to Unicode ‘Tiger’ (U+1F405)
musical_score in the last version was accidentally encoded as U+1F4BC (‘Briefcase’) instead of U+1F3BC. It’s now been fixed.

Changed shortcodes

triangular_flag -> triangle_flag

Other changes

‘travel_places/transport’ renamed to ‘travel_places/trains’.

Updating Orxporter

I’m currently diverting development attention away from forc (our WIP font creation tool) and onto what has become one of the roadblocks to making outputting standard Mutant Standard releases easy, which is our lovely workhorse exporting program called orxporter.

Like a lot of things in Mutant Standard, reaching for new technical heights or features (crushed PNGs, fonts, etc.) easily tips our infrastructural capacity to deal with it gracefully, necessitating another round of changes to our infrastructure.

Year 2 Goals

Here’s my breakdown of all the measurable things that I said I’d like to do last year, and what’s happened to those since then.

Mutant Standard is 2!

(Technically Mutant Standard’s birthday was yesterday; I didn’t really plan this stuff ahead, sorry xwx)

It’s been a bumpier year partly because the project has exanded so much, but so much more has been made or is in development and I’d like to once again thank everyone who has helped me in continuing this!

Progress Issues

In the past, I’ve talked about various mental health issues that I have that have made Mutant Standard generally difficult, but I haven’t really talked about issues I’ve had about the project itself.

Even though I did want to work on Mutant Standard less in a planning work/life balance sense, I’ve been working on it less than I actually wanted to for these reasons. To make sure that I’m not talking about the project under a lot of influence of these issues and therefore talk about Mutant Standard in an irrational light, I’ve waited for many months until now to actually attempt to talk about it.

Also other things I said I would do, like streaming, have been caught up in this for the same reasons, and other external reasons too.

[CW: mental health talk in this post.]

Mutant Standard S3

It’s still pride month, so here are some pride emoji!

All of Mutant Standard’s pride flags (with a few exceptions for the rainbow flag since it’s kinda complicated) have been reinterpreted into a few different other Mutant Standard symbols, as well as a new one – meeple, a staple tabletop gaming piece!

Some of these are extensions to symbols that have already had rainbow flag versions in normal Mutant Standard releases (like paw_print and 100) and some not.

You can get them all, alongside the existing special emoji here – https://mutant.tech/download/#special

0.4.0 sketches and thoughts – new emoji

In the previous post, I talk about the aesthetic approaches that have developed in this version, and the ways I have intentionally tried to create a new cohesive vision of how to design Mutant Standard emoji.

In this post, I’m going to go through the new emoji designs like I normally do with these posts!

Content Warning: I’m gonna be going over some alcohol and food emoji designs.

0.4.0 sketches and thoughts – aesthetic

In this post, I’m going to go over the variety of realisations I’ve made in my design process that have led to the various significant improvements that were made in 0.4.0.

Moving to a new release model

CW: I talk about mental health a little in this post.

I need to make changes to how I’m working on Mutant Standard:

I wanna move Mutant Standard away from batched releases (0.3.0, 0.3.1, 0.4.0, etc.) to something like a rolling release, where updates are smaller and incremental (possibly just named after dates ie. ‘2019-06-29’).
I really need to spend some time on improving my use of technologies to streamline Mutant Standard compilation and releases so they don’t waste the amount of time and energy they do right now.
I don’t want to do roadmaps as I’ve done them anymore because they just don’t work.
I kinda need to work on Mutant Standard less.

Here’s why I really need to do these things…

0.3.1 sketches and thoughts

Here’s my sketches for 0.3.1!

In general, looking back, I feel like a lot of what I did here was continue the new thinking that was started in 0.3.0, but was constrained with the design system baggage of earlier versions, and I feel that a good few of these just don’t reach their potential as a result. Some of these, I still really like.