I think I’m beginning to love kaomoji more and more because they’re both typographically inventive, and wonderfully exotic. Emoticons are usually just restricted to ASCII, but kaomoji often reach deep into Unicode.
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Emoji are restrictive as building blocks. They’re only lego bricks, although admittedly nice-looking ones. Emoticons and kaomoji give you bricks, too, but also opportunities to create new ones. (To Slack’s credit, they found a way for you to print new emoji bricks.)
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Kaomoji and emoticons function at a nice level of abstraction, too. Regular punctuation (e.g. ! ? ;) is very abstract. Emoji are very literal. It’s easier for me to see myself in the facepalm above; harder when it comes to
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It feels it all goes back to Scott McCloud:pic.twitter.com/wZSQzzJm6H
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Kaomoji and emoticons are also interesting because they fit with text well – they’re the same strokes, the same colour. Emoji and text never quite belong.
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However, punctuation and emoji are designed. Emoticons and particularly kaomoji are… awkward-looking. They are usually put together from weird ill-fitting pieces, often different fonts. The most inventive ones are at more risk of falling apart on different platforms than emoji.
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But when they work… I mean, just look at this: https://twitter.com/hels/status/990639794765160449 …
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Or, this! I mean, how is that not the most beautiful of things:https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/990640571780825088 …
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But what about #
?Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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The table flipping one is my fave (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
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Yes!!! I really wish we could have an oral history of some of those.
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