Mutant Standard 2024.06

A mint green background featuring four icons in the center: a black cat with a pink tongue, a green alien, a moai statue, and a bicycle. Below these icons, the text reads "2024.06 mutant.tech". There are 3 faces in the background of the graphic in faded teal colours - a smiling cat face, a frowning alien face, and a jack-o'-lantern face.

This is a modest update, bringing a bunch of smiley-adjacent emoji up to the new design aesthetic, including the much beloved black cats.

Design updates

A mint green background divided into two sections. The left section is labeled "previous designs" and shows various black cat faces with different expressions, a robot head, a ghost, an alien, a spider, and a jack-o'-lantern. The right section is labeled "updated designs" and shows the same icons but with updated designs that are clearer, more expressive and with softer shapes.

Most of the remaining existing smiley and smiley-adjacent emoji have now been updated to the newer, softer and clearer style.

The cats have been overhauled with a cuter appearance with more expressive eyes, while keeping the same black fur colour that makes Mutant Standard’s cats so unique.

A mint green background with lots of different emoji in a soft, minimalist vector aesthetic with thick black outline scattered across it, many of them are smileys, some are objects like watches, bicycles and phones, some are black cats, and some are silly or thematic symbols like alien monster, skull and jack-o'-lantern.

New emoji

A mint green background with the text "new designs" in a rectangular box at the top. Below the text, there are three icons: a bicycle, an Easter Island statue head, and a cow. Under these icons, the text reads "THANKS JACK & MOOENA!" in a handwritten style.

There are a few new Unicode emoji in this update too – bicycle, moai and goat. Than you very much to Mooena and Jack for sponsoring these emoji!

Breaking changes

The shortcode changes here make it so the cat smilies mirror the nomenclature used in current smileys more cleanly, sorry for the confusion this will inevitably create! 💀✌️

  • cat_smile -> cat_grin
  • cat_grin -> cat_smile

As I was taking stock of the non-typical smileys, I felt like it was a good idea to drop the grumpy_block emoji. I didn’t feel like it was particularly unique or like it added much to the set.

Eventual changes

I am moving the PUA/encoding documentation away from those PDF downloads finally and onto GitHub. This will be a slow, incremental effort, and I’ll make a proper post about it when it’s done!

The build file manifests have started getting new metadata, which, combined with a future update of Orxporter, should hopefully give me the ability to ‘shard’ the set, allowing folks to pick the elements of the set that suit them.