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.
As I mentioned last time, last month I took part in an event at the St Bride Foundation in London called “Collections and Collaborations” at which Tom Etherington and I, along with six other pairs of collaborators, launched the poster on which we’d been working for the past few months.
On Tuesday the 14th of May I’ll be taking part in an event at the St Bride Foundation in London called “Collections and Collaborations”. It’s a showcase for a set of posters inspired by St Bride and its collections, and I was lucky enough to be paired with the talented Tom Etherington, a book designer at Penguin, to help produce one of those posters.
I’m happy to announce that The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time is now available in Chinese (complex characters), courtesy of Taiwan’s Rye Field Publications. It’s available now and is priced at NT$550. If you happen to buy a copy, please leave a comment below or drop me a line via the contact form to let me know what you think!
Long-time readers will remember that 99% Invisible, the wide-ranging podcast hosted by Roman Mars and produced in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California, featured an episode on the octothorpe back in December 2014. It’s a great listen: 99PI producer Avery Trufelman managed to track down Doug Kerr and Lorne Asplund, two of the engineers at Bell Labs who were instrumental in placing the ‘#’ on the then-new telephone keypad and later christening it as the “octothorpe”, to get the story behind the mark’s rebirth in the computer age.