Mutant Standard 2023.12

A digital image with a tan background patterned with monochrome close-up smiley faces. At the center, there's a row of stylized emoji: scream, head shaking vertically, smilingg face with hearts and outline face. Below the icons, the text "2023.12 mutant.tech" in dark brown.

This update brings a massive redesign to most of the existing smileys, and updates the smilies (mostly) to the latest Unicode 15 spec.

Completely redesigned smileys

A year in the making, 100 existing smilies have been redesigned from scratch to be more expressive and more readable.

I have said a long term goal of mine is to make my smileys among the cutest and most expressive out there and I think I am considerably closer to that goal than I was with the previous designs.

This graphic displays two columns of emoji with the headings "previous designs" and "updated designs." The emoji in this image are happy and joyful emoji, such as smile, tongue sticking out and party face. The updated designs have softer and more subtle geometry, more subtle and expressive facial features and slightly warmer colours.
This graphic displays two columns of emoji with the headings "previous designs" and "updated designs." The emoji in this image are affectionate and appreciative emoji, such as flushed, heart eyes, kiss and headpat. The updated designs have softer and more subtle geometry, more subtle and expressive facial features and slightly warmer colours.
This graphic displays two columns of emoji with the headings "previous designs" and "updated designs." The emoji in this image are expressionless and sarcastic emoji, such as face without mouth, smirk, thinking and rolling eyes. The updated designs have softer and more subtle geometry, more subtle and expressive facial features and slightly warmer colours. Details are also bigger and much better contrasted.
This graphic displays two columns of emoji with the headings "previous designs" and "updated designs." The emoji in this image are exhausted and scared emoji, such as dizzy eyes, astonished, scream and asleep. The updated designs have softer and more subtle geometry, more subtle and expressive facial features and slightly warmer colours. Details are also bigger and much better contrasted.
This graphic displays two columns of emoji with the headings "previous designs" and "updated designs." The emoji in this image are disappointed, sad and crying emoji. The updated designs have softer and more subtle geometry, more subtle and expressive facial features and slightly warmer colours.
This graphic displays two columns of emoji with the headings "previous designs" and "updated designs." The emoji in this image are a mix of designs representing illness, anger and unusual forms such as imps, poop and cowhand. The updated designs have softer and more subtle geometry, more subtle and expressive facial features and slightly warmer colours.

This update adds many new smilies to bring the smileys mostly up to date with the latest Unicode 15 spec. This is with the exception of ‘Face in Clouds’ and ‘Face With Peeking Eye’, which I will try to make for 2024.02. I didn’t have enough time to finish them for this update.

There are also other smiley-adjacent emoji that I want to update in 2024.02 to complete this process, such as cats, alien, etc.

A beige background with the text "new sponsored designs" at the top. Below are stylized icons: a pot of stew, a pudding flan, a taco, a sunflower, and a bee. Handwritten at the bottom are the words "codl, ionchy, tacowolf, moshibar thank you!" with a signature, surrounded by small hearts.

This version also has the first sponsored emoji – where folks can contribute to the project in a new way by buying development time on particular Unicode emoji I haven’t done yet. Thank you to codl, ionchy, tacowolf and moshibar for making these ones possible!

If you’re interested, you can check it out on my Ko-fi!

This redesign helps lay more foundations for future design work set out by the previous two updates: softer, flatter and bolder design work. This new look also embraces edge cropping for a more dynamic appearance that gives me a bit more design space if needed.

Shortcode changes

I want to try to work towards providing more convenient packages with an eye to better platform adoption in 2024.02 and I was also struggling to grapple with my own interpretations of some fairly vague designs (especially the grinning ones), so I took the opportunity in this redesign to bring shortcodes more in line (although not completely) with how various platforms use them.

This could result in some weird behaviour if changing them out on a Mastodon server, as some of these changes result in a few designs swapping around.

  • smile -> slight_smile
  • upside_down_smile -> upside_down
  • big_smile -> grinning
  • happy -> smiley
  • grin -> smile
  • grinning -> grin
  • stick_out_tongue -> stuck_out_tongue
  • xd_tongue -> closed_eyes_tongue
  • embarrassed -> flushed
  • hug -> hugging_face
  • wink_kiss -> blowing_a_kiss
  • straight_face -> neutral_face
  • surprised -> hushed
  • shocked -> anguished
  • unhappy -> frown_open_mouth (the design for this one is substantially different than the original due to previous confusion over Unicode codepoints)
  • smile_w_tear -> smile_with_tear
  • loud_cry -> sob
  • sneezing -> sneeze
  • nauseous -> face_with_thermometer
  • sick -> nauseous
  • angry_steam -> triumph
  • cool_face -> sunglasses_face
  • nerd_face -> nerd
  • shit -> poop
  • hot_shit -> flaming_poop

Other improvements

  • Greatly improved text descriptions for smileys, many of which did not have proper text descriptions at all. I didn’t notice this until now, many apologies.