Mutant Standard April 2020

Header image

The new production pipeline is in full swing and so is shorter, more frequent releases. This update gives smileys an overhaul, gives more performance updates, fixes various emoji and adds a few new ones.

Revamped smilies

Most smilies have been moved to a new design, giving them a look that is more cute and more expressive than before!

Certain smiley designs have also been changed to be more consistent with other emoji sets.

New hand gesture

The new hand expression in Unicode emoji this year is called ‘Pinched Fingers’. This is Unicode’s name for a very common Italian hand gesture called ‘che vuoi?’ (basically meaning ‘what do you want?’). The gesture can mean a variety of things depending on the context or how the pinched finger hand is moved.

This is the first time that a Mutant Standard hand expression has been released to all 4 hand types at the same time.

Other new & updated emoji

  • New package emoji
  • New smile_w_tear emoji
  • New yawn emoji
  • New hoof version of ok_hand
  • New mechanical_arm
  • Updated soap emoji
  • Updated moon and sun faces
  • Some visual consistency fixes in claw hands
  • Fixed some other emoji designs

Reduced SVG size

Thanks to recent fixes in the graphics software I use to make the emoji designs, the size of SVG packages are significantly smaller than before. For example, the SVG shortcode emoji set is now 38% smaller than the last version.

This update only reduces the size of the most numerous emoji (hands) to a more compressed final state, as well as a few others. So as I work on more and more emoji and compress more of the existing collection, you will see continued size reductions in future updates.

Moved emoji

I’m trying to re-organise emoji to either put things in places where people are more likely to expect them, or generally put things in easier/more understandable places.

Most of the RPG, occult and cyberpunk related emoji have been moved to a new category/folder called extra.

We’re finally on a shorter release schedule!

Mutant Standard releases will now be published at the end of every second month, so the next release will be at the end of June.

Other stuff

Removed emoji

I’ve decided to remove two emoji for various reasons:

  • queer – The design just wasn’t very good or readable and I think there are many better other ways you can express queerness with the other symbols in Mutant Standard.
  • privacy – It has a really limited scope for where you can use it, and the design and intention behind it represents a politics of negation (ie. saying what you’re against instead of proposing something better), which isn’t what Mutant Standard is about.

Technical changes and fixes

  • confused has been renamed to dizzy_face to match other vendors more (and because it’s kiiinda more accurate).
  • surprised and open_mouth have had each other’s unicode codepoints for quite a while! This has been fixed now.
  • body part emoji have been moved out of the people_animals category to expressions.
  • Most RPG, occult and cyberpunk related emoji have been moved to a new category/folder called extra.
  • Some emoji have been re-ordered within their existing categories (you will only notice this if you use the JSON metadata),
  • No more changelog text in the emoji packages. These blog posts are going to be the central source of all change logs from now on.