We moved from London to Birmingham a couple of years ago now, and one of the first things I noticed when we arrived were the street signs: extravagant, cast-iron behemoths far removed from London’s restrained licence plates for buildings. Above is a typical street sign in Edgbaston, our then-new neighbourhood; below is an old-style enamelled sign from Wandsworth, our previous one.
In the midst of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Twitter user @talkporty got in touch to ask:
Dear @shadychars, you are the only one I can turn to in this situation. I am being hounded by EM-DASHES! Help! How has #covidー19uk become a trending hashtag? Nobody types them in.
Well, ✨that was fun✨❗ For now, though, it’s time to work our way through some of the punctuation-related links and news articles that have cropped up during our stay in emojiland. Stick around; there’s some great stuff to come.
A couple of months ago, in the midst of writing my emoji series, I took some time out to have a chat with Glenn Fleishman for his new podcast series, the Tiny Typecast. Glenn is an old friend of the blog and is astonishingly well-informed about books, typography and all things related: we talked about books and book history for what felt like a few minutes, but turned out to be the better part of an hour. Glenn is easy to talk to and, if you check out our conversation on Apple Podcasts or at Glenn’s blog, you’ll find that he’s easy to listen to, too. (The jury is still out on yours truly.)
As exuberant as emoji can be in the right hands, our palette of emoji remains tightly controlled by the Unicode Consortium. There are, however, other ways to embed colourful graphics in your digital messages, and, in the long run, there is every possiblity that they may elbow emoji out of the way entirely. The future of emoji may not be emoji at all.