Designing Noto 3D Emoji for the Way We Communicate Today
Designing emoji for the way we communicate today
We are evolving emoji from literal symbols to tools that capture modern hyperbole and emotional depth. Our new Noto 3D designs prioritize expression over photorealism, ensuring they feel alive rather than like cold industrial models. By analyzing user behavior and building AI-powered contrast tools, we ensure accessibility while releasing open-source 3D models for the community to remix and redefine language.
They need a pulse and a soul — not the cold precision of industrial CAD models.
- ollin
This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much.
This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B slider vs the old versions. Overall the new design looks like a fairly tasteful compromise between Google's previous flat-shaded vector emoji and the hybrid 2d+3d Apple emoji, with the benefits (easier to rerender with higher-resolution, animations, tweaked lighting, etc.) that you'd get from a fully-3D pipeline. So I like the new set of emoji, just not this particular blog.google.com article.
- BoppreH
Having read the article, I still don't understand the point of 3D modeling emoji. Even the user interviews didn't mention it, and problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.
I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms. There are still significant differences between Android and iOS, for example. They recognize how subtle emoji interpretation is, so the only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels.
- xd1936
Does anyone know _where_ these supposed 4,000 OBJ files are open-sourced? They don't seem to be in the Noto Emoji GitHub repo, nor linked anywhere in the article.
- fnoef
OMG leave the emojis alone! It's the classic example of a product that reached it's final form. Stop "innovating" the damn emojis
- summermusic
The best emoji for the way we communicate today would be to revert the water pistol back to a real gun.