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FAQ

Licensing and development

Why use a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license?

I want every online community to be able to use Mutant Standard if they want to, but I also want to be able to be credited for my work, ensure that my hard work can be compensated for and not be exploited.

Is Mutant Standard open source?

No, but it is copyleft, and you can make derivatives of Mutant Standard emoji designs, with restrictions outlined in the license.

There are associated software projects that are created and used by Mutant Standard that are under Ethical Source licenses. You can find them on this project’s GitHub.

Can I use Mutant Standard emoji in my open source project?

Yes, as long as you comply with the emoji license. Here’s a few tips:

  • Compliance with Non-Commercial aspect of Mutant Standard’s CC license will probably depend on your use case or the people that run your software (especially if it’s networked).
  • If this is software with a front-facing UI, make sure you place a CC notice somewhere as per the use instructions (somewhere static, non-editable and where anyone can see like a footer or among other licensing notices)
  • Don’t present your use of Mutant Standard emoji as if it is an endorsement from Mutant Standard.

Can I get a commercial license for Mutant Standard emoji?

There are no commercial licensing options for Mutant Standard emoji at the moment.

Is Mutant Standard in active development?

Only a little bit. I worked on the project a lot for several years but lately I’ve been feeling like working on other things. Sometimes there are updates to Mutant Standard but they are slow and as I feel like doing them.


Suggestions and Contributions

Do you accept emoji contributions?

To avoid organisational, copyright and economic complications that would come with it, I’m not accepting contributions. but I wholeheartedly encourage you to make and release your own emoji by yourself or with other people .

Have you thought about making animated emoji?

I won’t be making animated emoji. I don’t have the resources for them, and they are unusable to people who have certain kinds of motion sickness issues, so they’re not a particularly great use of my limited development time IMO.


Meta

What does the name mean?

The name originally came from the name of a song I like by Oneohtrix Point Never.

It stuck with me as I was making them. It seemed very appropriate as this set exists as a counterpoint to Unicode’s emoji - the Unicode Standard. It also points to the fact that this emoji set is not entirely new - it is a mutation of the Unicode Standard.

What tools do you use to make your emoji?

All emoji designs are produced in Affinity Designer (which I am happy to just flat out tell you because they are a software company that doesn’t practice Digital Feudalism/Rentierism).

But to get all of the colour variants and different file versions (ie. codepoint, shortcode, 32px, 128px, SVG, etc.) made and exported efficiently, I have an in-house tool called orxporter, which you can find at this project’s GitHub.


Deviations and non-standard emoji

Why promote a lot of non-standard emoji? Isn’t that bad for the internet?

I think the outcome of promoting non-standard emoji is the opposite; we need this diversity. I think this is something many westerners (especially anglophones) don’t understand the implications of very well, but there should never be a universal language. Not for written or spoken communication, not for pictorial communication, but this is what we are getting with Unicode emoji.

The tools we use to communicate (language, emoji, body gestures, etc.) shape how we perceive the world. Emoji are not just cute little pictures - our use of them has and will continue to shape us. And as we do as readily with words, we should be able to use our language to express who we are instead of being in a system where the only vocabulary we use comes from someone else.

I don’t think the Unicode Consortium has bad intentions but i think it’s a very bad and short-sighted idea to let one group of people decide what emoji we use.

Why make nonhuman colour emoji?

The reason I originally did it was for myself. If you know me online, I am some sort of furry, I represent myself as an orc online, and I’ve generally always wished there were some green skin variants of emoji so that I can feel more emotionally connected to what I was posting online.

I definitely don’t equate fantasy creatures with IRL human races (and that’s not the point or intention of this option), but it doesn’t stop this feature from being of use or emotionally important to people for a whole variety of reasons.

I’ve noticed people who don’t have a nonhuman persona also take an interest in using them anyway. You might just want to use a different colour, or you might want to change things up for more emotional impact (like use red if you’re angry). Maybe you could change a different default color than yellow. There are a lot of possibilities, really.

And of course, you don’t have to use them at all.

What Unicode emoji are you not going to make?

Mutant Standard is never going to be 100% Unicode compatible. Unicode release hundreds of new symbols each year and I don’t have the time or desire to make feature parity.

But there are certain symbols that will never be made:

  • Police officer and border-related emoji
  • Guns
  • Gender binary toilet signs
  • Family ZWJs. It’s exclusionary to non-normative family or guardian arrangements and I think it’s a bad technical design (you can just put people next to each other in sequence if you want to imply a family arrangement).
  • Copyright and Trademark symbols. Copyright law is out of control, and they don’t need emoji, they are normal Unicode text codepoints.
  • Country Flags. Due to the time involved in making them, and the political implications of deciding who gets flags and who doesn’t.

Why use PUA codepoints instead of ZWJs of existing Unicode Standard characters?

There are many practical, cultural and technical reasons for this really, too much to list in an FAQ. But I weighed the options and felt like PUA encodings were by far the best way to go for the project.

Would you consider submitting some of your emoji ideas to the Unicode Consortium?

I don’t agree with Unicode’s emoji philosophy and I don’t agree with their decision making process, so I wouldn’t want to validate that by making any submissions. (Plus, even if I did, I would not expect them to succeed.)

A big part of why this project exists is because I want to create the emoji myself and others want to see instead of asking someone else for permission.

Don’t you think it should be the role of an emoji vendor to be non-political?

All art and design is political. Just because Unicode presents themselves as an organisation working on some principle of non-bias and universality, it doesn’t mean that it actually exists in practice.

By the mere choice to select what pictures to insert into an emoji standard, you are making a statement as to what things you think are important and what is not. This is a political statement.

And the way that Silicon Valley tech companies (who comprise part of who Unicode is in the first place) enforce emoji by restricting the use (whether intentionally or not) of alternative emoji sets also makes a political statement about what they think these symbols are and what they represent and how people should use them. - One set of pictures, selected partly by Silicon Valley (with some Japanese influences because of emoji’s history), and provided by Silicon Valley for everyone around the world, regardless of what your cultural background is, regardless of who you as an individual are.

Much has been said about the dangerous level of political and social influence that Silicon Valley is exerting through their products and through exploitative economic practices, but little has been said about cultural influence via things such as emoji.