We are lucky to have Paul Hunt here on the Adobe Type team — now in his seventh year with the group.

In addition to his regular type design work (you might be familiar with Source Sans, or one of his Brahmic script designs like Adobe Gurmukhi), Paul works on emoji design projects for Unicode (and is, in fact, a member of the organization’s emoji subcommittee), and puts a lot of thought into the potential for this relatively new form of communication.

In honor of World Emoji Day — annually on July 17 — Paul gave two different interviews. Nice work, Paul!

“I’m hoping that more emoji fonts are developed for the purpose of broadening emoji’s usefulness as a communication tool.”
— from “We Talked to a Typeface Designer About Creating Emojis for Unicode”

On Motherboard, Leif Johnson’s interview presents a great overview of the work Paul does with Unicode, and how the approval process works for new emoji — as well as how Unicode deals with some of the more controversial issues around emoji availability and design.

“I try to use a more iconic style, that’s very simplified and reduced down to a basic element just for clarity. It’s similar to what we do in type design: we consider the end usage and design to that usage.”
— from “The Art & Science of Making Emoji”

Meanwhile on the Adobe Creative Cloud blog, Paul gets more into the process of his design work, and talks about some of his inspirations.

Great work, Paul! And happy World Emoji Day 🌏