New Emojis are Underway, Our Dear Tech Nation; The Low Down

A lot has changed since a couple of years ago from sending a basic smiley face that you had to turn your phone sideways to see (semi-colon and closed bracket) to an assortments of emoticons that are little animations that you can put in texts. The list is about to grow as 250 new emoticons are planned to hit the market in mid-July.

Emoji’s as they are now affectionately known by have in recent years become a large part of texting and instant messaging world-wide, even being adopted by large social media websites like Facebook. Unicode Inc., the company that creates Emoji’s, on Monday released the newest version of its coding system simply called Unicode version 7.0.

The company Unicode is being rather modest about their new development, saying that the new Emojis introduced were not a product of long hard brainstorming hours but instead where derived from long standing Wingdings and Web-dings fonts. However modest they may try to be, it’s hard to deny that everyone will be raving mostly about 1 of the 250 Emojis that are scheduled to come out, the “reverse hand with middle finger extended” Emoji, and yes that’s what it’s called.

The new Emojis will see new exciting characters like ‘building construction’ and ‘man in business suit levitating’, but apparently there is still a high lack of black characters even in the new release of Emojis, but when questioned this is how Unicode defended themselves, “Unicode does not require a particular racial or ethnic appearance—or for that matter, a particular hair style: bald or hirsute. However, because there are concerns regarding the Emoji characters for people, proposals are being developed by Unicode Consortium members to provide more diversity.”

Although news about the release of new Emojis has been publicized, no official images of the new emoticons has been published until the company finishes up with the last final stage and officially releases in July, after which you can view them at Emojipedia.org

To see a list of all the names being given to all the new 250 characters click here.

Image Credit: SoundCloud