First, you should know the official meaning of emoji. Many mistake emoticon with emoji, but emoji are actual pictures instead of typographics. It comes from the japanese word e (絵, picture) + moji (文字, character) and they are smileys used in electronic communications, apps and web pages.

Are emojis text characters like letters? Let’s discover UNICODE 

The original and default emojis are the ones  in the middle of the text, like they were a font. And that’s a reality, they are text characters with a big problem: compatibility. When an author of a message picks an emoji from a keyboard, it is normally encoded in a non-graphical manner during the transmission, and if the reader do not use the same software or operating system (iOS / Android / Windows..) for his device, the reader’s device may visualize the same emoji in a different way. For example, instead got a heart emoji you see a weird character like ☐. Maybe that happened to you sometime.

That why exists UNICODE. It’s a universal character encoding standard that assigns a code to every character and symbol in every language in the world. That helps the communication between users work with letters but also with symbols (♡ ® ª ). Those symbols were the beginning of emojis.  In 2010, hundreds of emoji characters were encoded in the Unicode Standards (including requested of Apple and Google). In spite of this, if you have an iphone and your friend android, the emoji will not be the same.

For example: When you send an smiley emoji from your iPhone to android’s friend, he will see the “android ” smiley and vice verse. That applies to any OS.

 What happens then with custom and new emojis?

Unicode requires a lengthy submission and approval process and it can take up to two years for an emoji to be in your phone. Only a few of emojis are included each year (remember the contests and announcements on the media). If you want to read more about it, visit the unicode official site here.

Solution? About the emojis huge size

As you read before, if you want to send an emoji in the text (as unicode character) you need to be in the same OS as your friend because if not, your friend will not see the emoji, just a weird character like ☐. 

So the indie emoji company would need to develop a new completely OS (to build a new iOS or Android). And that’s not all. You’ll need to convince the phone companies to include it on their phones and convince the user to get it. Yes, that’s completely crazy for an indie company. Another option is to launch a really popular app like Facebook with million of users using it’s message unique system.

This when the indie creativity makes his appearance. Although is not possible to do it as text character, we’ll get as close as we can making a keyboard and sending the emojis through it using the COPY & PASTE feature. The size is bigger because is not possible to include the emojis next to the text. It has to go separately and as an image. The good thing is that the emojis are more detailed, so we took this as advantage. Default emojis are small and need to be simpler, but as our emojis are images, we draw them high quality and handmade.

See the difference:

crusoe emoji hunter

This will be as default emoji next to text

crusoe hunter

This is the full image you can share.