Really cool concept. Apparently these are all handmade emojis made for Google's Android Keyboard [1]. And by the looks of it they are all available at fairly obvious URLs [2], which this tool exposes in a fun interface.
There's also a lot of funny combinations that use three emoji, which you can't do with this page, if anyone's using Gboard already they should definitely give it a go :)
Both examples are still two emoji. In the first, the second emoji is the combination of u1f62e and u1f4a8 via a zero width join (u200d) to form the exhaling emoji glyph. Explained more here https://emojipedia.org/face-exhaling/
Thanks for pointing out the URL - I tried and failed to find it when I discovered these for myself, but now you've found it for me I might try to make something to enumerate them.
The prompts are super annoying and don't make me want to check out the rest of the site. Takes me out of the experience a bit, especially because it's like a worse popup since they can't be blocked.
That said, this is cute. I wonder if this uses the same approach that certain Android keyboards use to combine emojis
The attention to detail is some cases is impressive. E.g. in the regular owl emoji the owl has its wings folded; but when mixed with a celebrating emoji, it spreads its wings. Not to mention mixing bat and cake.
That being said, the UI can be annoying. It's hard to scroll the lists and the popups are distracting.
I love it but the popups get a bit annoying. Especially because I want to stay on the page but they take me away from it if I click OK.
I think it's okay to plug your other projects and ask for feedback, but maybe open it in a new tab? Or just have regular links in the page, and users will click them if they want to.
Most likely every emoji was broken up into segments that are tagged for what they are + their relative importance to the emoji + where they should be located. When combining two emoji's you pick out the top weighted parts of the emoji and combines them in some clever way. Llama+bee becomes a yellow striped lama with antennae.
Certain modifications are made in some cases like where Bread+Cat results in a cat wearing a bread "helmet" where you see the cat's body (which you normally don't). There are most likely high-level rules governing this so it doesn't have to be made on each single emoji combination. Most likely emoji's tagged [animal] combined with "Bread" uses that pattern. [animal]+[animal] becomes the first animal wearing the second animal as a costume and so on.
Yep, and I'm guessing there are also groups of emoji that work the same when merged with another emoji. For example, I think any monkey emoji + bread gives monkey bread.
I use these from Gboard all the time. If you're using Android it's my go-to keyboard, allowing you to resize and shift the keyboard to where it's comfortable for your hand (among other features).
But honestly, the effort put into customizing each combination is insane. There are about 189 * 189 = 35721 total combinations and most are bespoke in the best possible way.
I've had fun finding these on the keyboard for a while - it's great to come across a new emoji that combines and then go through all the others to see what you get. (The key question being, will it combine with City to give Giant X Destroying City, or just City With X For A Sun?)
One that annoys me - _something_ combines with bread to give Giant Circular Tear And Share Bread, but I've yet to find out what it is. (Edit: oh my god it's monkey bread.)
Pretty neat. I did notice though that if you try to combine sleeping face with monkey covering its eyes, you get just the plain sleeping face for some reason.
:eyes: doesn’t seem to have a lot of pairings, but there are some with some of the heart emoji (EDIT: I tried adding a permalink, but I’m having trouble doing so on mobile; does HN not support full Unicode?)
I hope compojis makes it into some kind of standard. Some of the combinations are just silly, but often they help express an emotion that is difficult to express concisely otherwise. Maybe ligatures could work as a technical avenue?
The UI for the search is pretty confusing. It took me a minute or so to realize that once you click a magnifying glass, a giant searchbar appears at the bottom
it seems like they were hand made by some artist. first I thought there was some AI/ML going on. But these are too good to have been made by some algorithm
1: https://9to5google.com/2021/09/24/gboard-emoji-kitchen-list/
2: e.g. https://www.gstatic.com/android/keyboard/emojikitchen/202108...