Despite the fact that today most users of instant messengers and social networks prefer to use stickers to express their emotions or visually support their opinion, the good old emoji still remain in use. Affected by a wider assortment of possible options, of which a smiling turd or, say, a monkey with closed eyes is just the very tip of the iceberg, hiding underneath literally thousands of all kinds of emoticons, including inclusive and extremely unconventional ones. But now those that have turned out as a result of crossing will be added to them.
It seems that emojis are not as popular as stickers, but Google felt that customizing them would change everything.
Google has decided to add a built-in emoji editor called Emoji Kitchen to the proprietary Gboard keyboard for Android. It does not combine them with each other so that you get two consecutive emoji, but allows you to literally take the distinctive features of different emoji and cross them, in fact, creating a completely new emoji. The result can be a poop in a hat, a monkey cactus, or a robot with a plaintive expression. In short, you can create as you like and not adjust to the options already available, but adjust them personally for yourself.
How to customize emoji
Google allows you to change emoji, but only within the limits of the permissible
Few people know that all emojis require mandatory formatting in Unicode, as it turned out, this limitation could be circumvented. Despite the fact that as a result of crossing we get completely new types of emoji, designers always leave behind an external embodiment, which is why, it would seem, the same smile performed by two companies like Apple and Google can differ a lot. In the process of crossbreeding through Emoji Kitchen, Google simply changes the design style of each emoji slightly, leaving the underlying essence the same. Therefore, a cactus remains a cactus, a robot is a robot, and a turd, sadly, a turd.
This approach allowed Google, firstly, not to bother with Unicode, and secondly, to immediately start using freshly created emoji in all imaginable messengers without the approval of their creators. However, because of this, I had to consciously go for a number of restrictions. In particular, users can only crossbreed emoji to the extent that the cross has been approved by Google. That is, it will no longer work to take and put a poop on the head of a robot, as well as replace parents or children with cacti on a family emoji.
How to create your own emoji
It turns out that Emoji Kitchen is not real cooking where you can create the way you want, but something like a semi-finished product. Here you are not allowed to act on your own, offering to choose only from the list of available options. The designers of the search giant, of course, tried to work out the maximum possible ways to customize emoji, but they still won't let you do something really your own, and, of course, a very limited number of emoticons is compatible with Emoji Kitchen.
So far, the Emoji Kitchen feature is only available in the beta version of Gboard, and only in the version for Android, but will be released soon. Perhaps someone will say that this innovation does not make sense at all, since it does not carry any practical benefit. But, as practice shows, many users are waiting with great interest for the appearance of new emoticons, and therefore the ability to create their own – albeit with a number of conventions and restrictions – will definitely please at least some of them. Well, those who think this idea is not worth a damn, may simply not use it. That's all.