An image is worth a thousand words, that is something evident, and the famous Emoji base their success on this, the small icons that have become indispensable when communicating with someone through written messages, whether they are SMS, WhatsApp or email . They are a quick way to communicate feelings or describe situations with a single symbol. Also, as they are universal, everyone understands the same ... or not? Have you ever seen the Emoji on an Android or Windows Phone device? Surely you can take a surprise if you take a look at it. We are going to see some very illustrative examples.
It has been perfectly described by Bianca Bosker in the Huffington Post, in her article "How Emoji Get Lost in Translation". Indeed, Emoji are a universal language, they are based on a series of characters that are translated into an image, but how that image is designed is left to the designers of each platform. An example for better understanding, the characters «U + 1F48 ″ should reflect a dancer, but the dancer is very different on iOS (Apple operating system), Android, Twitter or Windows Phone. You can look at the image on these lines and see how la Apple's "flamenco dancer" and Android's "disco" dancer have little to do with each other...
So from now on, be careful what you send to your friends, because being dressed as a "bailaora" is not very suitable for dancing "disco". The design issue is now at the discretion of each one ... it seems clear that Apple designers have dedicated a little more time to create their Emoji than those of other platforms. Will Apple's Emoji suffer from a new, flatter design someday in the style of iOS 7? The truth is that seeing those on Twitter, I think I'd better stick with the ones we have right now.
