Hey, I’m semi-back from my break and other things I need to do in my life, giving you a plan of what I’d like to do with the project over the next few months. Hopefully it will go to plan this time! ^^’
Mutant Standard emoji and tech (ie. font) releases are going to be separate from now on.
The last (and first, kinda) roadmap I made was kinda a mess because of how long what became Mutant Standard 0.4.0 took to release.
Despite really wanting to have more regular rolling releases, I was attempting (at least for me) a pretty ambitious technical undertaking, but because it was tied to emoji content releases, Mutant Standard 0.4.0 almost took 6 months to actually come out instead of the 2-month release cycle I had just declared the version before. (This did mean more emoji content, but I didn’t enjoy how long it was and I don’t like the feel of going on for that long without releases.)
So I think at this point, I think it’s a good idea to clearly recognise that Mutant Standard is really a collection of projects, rather than one pipeline of stuff. So tech stuff like fonts will be developed, released and announced separately from Mutant Standard emoji.
When there’s a new version of fonts, that will be announced and rolled out with existing emoji. When there’s a new version of emoji, that will be announced and rolled out with existing font technology. Both tech and emoji releases will get their own release posts and release notes. It should hopefully mean more regular updates, and you can keep track of those things better because they’re distributed out, rather than lumped in together.
I plan on trying to maintain 2-month rolling releases for emoji characters (as long as my mental health is okay, else I’ll shift release cut-offs to make up for lost time). For tech stuff, because I’m not that much of a programmer and things like fonts are quite complicated and not clear, releases will basically come out as I figure out the fixes that will make forc export more compatible fonts, in more formats, and so on.
As always, I’ll let you know how I’m doing on everything.
Mutant Standard 0.4.1
Planned start: May 2019, Planned release cut-off: July 2019
Here’s the current Trello board for 0.4.1.
- More work on furry emoji (more hoof hand experiments, more expressions and creatures)
- Hoof hands may not actually get released, but I will put much more time into trying to make them.
- Some more queer things if there’s anything more to do???
- Some more emoji improvements (but much less than in 0.4.0)
- Some more Private Use Area encoding.
forc (Fonts) 0.0.2
forc is the (rather bad) name I’ve given to the software I’ve made that creates fonts from Mutant Standard emoji. It’s open source and you can try it yourself if you’re techy enough!
(It has a lot of documentation but it might not be strictly complete yet)
Planned start: May 2019, unclear end date
Font upgrades will be announced and released as I figure out how to make them.
Here’s the current Trello for forc (it’s pretty technical and specific)
- Aim for relatively flawless SVGinOT glyph visibility (so that SVGinOT fonts will properly work on Windows and Linux)
- Aim for at least basic working CBx (Google/Android) format exports
- Better sbix (Apple format) metrics
Mutant Standard S3
Unknown release date, as usual, it will be kinda when I feel like doing it.
Here’s a current outline of S3 emoji ideas on Trello.
Other Things
web-based technical reference
The current PDF-based technical references for Mutant Standard (which I still haven’t updated for 0.4.0 yet, I will get that done as soon as I can) are not great. PDFs are kind of inflexible, and I find them frustrating and difficult to produce and update.
In the near-future (not sure when exactly), I would like to migrate these to a simple web-based system that should hopefully be easier to read and easier to update. This might be part of a larger site update where I move the site onto technologies that will make the entire website easier to update.
Pausing the merch store (for now)
Mutant Standard emoji designs fluctuate quite often and making merch takes quite a bit of labour and time to produce, even when I automate that process as much as possible.
I appreciate every single person that buys something on the store, but the amount I get in total doesn’t really compensate the effort that I’ve made in updating or making new merch, and I’m not personally motivated by this type merch as much as other merch I’ve tried recently (which I would be making and selling right now, if it wasn’t for the fact that by my current estimates, I’d lose a lot of money doing it).
Now that 0.4.0 has outdated most, if not all of the emoji designs on the Redbubble merch store, I took the liberty of quietly dropping the merch link from the Mutant Standard website and will look into more formally pausing the actual merch store in the near-future. So if you want to get some merch of the older designs, you still can, but probably not for too much longer.