How to get your idea on every smartphone in the world
Emerging at 4.30am from yet another night of baby-inflicted sleep deprivation, I squinted at my phone’s keyboard in search of a fittingly hagged emoji. Where was the face with eye bags? 💁
It didn’t exist 😱. Surely the world’s child-wranglers, hungover partygoers, diehard students, and shift workers have also searched in vain for such an emoji? And what about the beauty industry? Don’t they need a ‘before’ face for their influencer Instagram posts?
💡😮 It hit me. “Icould get this emoji — my idea — on every smartphone, tablet, computer, and major social platform in the world”. Cue manic laughter 😈
A quick Google brought me to the emoji gatekeepers — the Unicode Technical Committee(UTC). For the noobs, the Unicode is the universal computing standard which allows everyone in the world, irrespective of language, to access and use the same library of characters and symbols — some of which are emoji.
Once an emoji has been accepted into the Unicode it will exist there forever. This makes for a pretty cool (albeit tiny) legacy.
To kick off the process, I was required to write, compile, design and submit a proposal to the UTC Emoji Sub-Committee documenting a range of evidence supporting the introduction of my emoji. Anyone can submit a proposal, however, the submitter must be able to prove (with data, not petitions) that the new emoji is unique, timeless, easily recognisable in minutia, and useful to the masses.
For those who revel in nitty-gritty detail 🤓, you can find my full submission here and more from others here. Skim readers (assuming you’re still with me) may proceed to the next paragraph.
Long story short, evidence supporting my proposed emoji was relatively easy to find. One Google search alone yielded 5.78 billion page results for the term ‘baby sleep’ — more than double the 2.43 billion results of the comparison term ‘recipe’. It seems my child is not the only one who believes that sleep is for the weak, and I am not the only parent who values sleep more than food.
Recent statistics also highlighted the obvious — there are lots of babies born each year 👶🏻 and even more hungover drunkards 🍺. Beyond these groups, it seems safe to assume that everyone in the world will be sleep deprived and sporting eye bags at some point.
Currently, my emoji proposal is early on in the UTC’s 24-month process. A tedious wait lay ahead but admittedly there is an appeal to the suspense it creates. Over this two year period, the Emoji Sub-Committee will review my proposal (along with around 50 others) and escalate valid emoji requests to the UTC. The UTC will then review and pitch their recommendations to the major platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Samsung. If the platforms agree with the recommendations they will go on to design the emoji in their own style and make it available on their keyboard for the next Unicode release.
So, if one day you see an emoji with eye bags on your device keyboard, you can think back to this article and know that you have a tiny representation of ‘tired Erin’ nearby at all times (and there’s nothing you can do about it 😈).
The UTC approved the 💩 emoji, so I’d say mine’s in with a shot 😂
What will your emoji be?
