Android 5.0 Lollipop: the Best Emoji

I've never been that big of a fan of most emoji. Apple popularized the the use of gradients in emoji, but I think it just looks so ugly . Gradients look nice in a background, but the moment they're put into a character design they just look tacky. The reason I like flat colors so much is because they don't have any ugly gradients, they're easy to draw, and they're easy to read at small sizes .

Lots of emoji use only flat colors; but what makes the Lollipop set my favorite is how expressive they are . It's funny how this is both this set's greatest weakness and greatest strength . The way the emoji bend down or look up makes the expression harder to see at small sizes, and the big differences in expression compared to other emoji can lead to miscommunication😳, and yet; these traits are what make this set stand out from apple, and all the people trying to copy apple .

And that's why I had to bring back these emoji . Google themselves has abandoned this set in favor of more apple-like emoji. However, I had an idea as to where I could still find them . Google is a big user of open source software. They make the original source documents for much of their work publicly available; so they can be easily modified or improved on by others (without pay). Github is currently the main platform for hosting source code, and they also keep a history of every change made to the source . I navigated to Google's repository for their Noto emoji, clicked on "releases", and scrolled down as far as I could and found a release made in September 2015, after the release of android 5 but before the release of android 6.0.1. Sure enough, when I downloaded the source code in this release; it contained original SVG files for all of the android 5.0 emoji .

Figuring how I could get those SVG files into a state where I could easily use them on my blog was difficult . My first idea was to use an emoji font, it just seemed the most intuitive . However, what was not intuitive was the four different standards for making colored fonts, all of which have different levels of support across browsers and systems . I wanted to use the SVG-in-Opentype format, because this one had the least limitations and would be the easiest to make, since I already had SVG files ready to go . Sadly, there were very few user-friendly tools for making SVG-in-Opentype colored fonts . After a lot of struggling, I found adobe's opentype-svg tools, which looked to be the most user-friedly tool available. The addsvg tool required a host font to add the SVGs to, for which I used Noto Emoji SVG. It worked perfectly, however, I only realized afterward that using a font format only supported by firefox was a terrible idea, and it would be much better to use inline SVGs instead, so I did that . I changed the names of the SVG documents to match the emoji they represented, so I could more easily type them in . Renaming them all was a bit difficult, so you can download them at the emoji folder of my website (2.46 MB). If you're interested in the font, you can download the emoji font here.