Journaling: I first encountered emojis in a word cloud about breakfast. Gee, I thought, how cute - so I successfully set out to solve the technical challenge of making word clouds with food emojis suitable for recipe cards. But beyond their use as decorations, emojis don't cut it for me. I use an occasional emotion ; ) to quickly convey "body language" that won't come across in an e-mail, but I don't text; heck, I don't even own a smartphone, so I completely ignored the smiley face on my Kindle keyboard. When I read about emoji "tofu," empty boxes in place of emoji that won't display, I thought of the soybean product. I had no ideas that emojis had become such a big thing, described by The Guardian's Jonathan Jones as "the fasting growing language in the UK." But after doing more research, I ended up agreeing with Jones: "After millennia of painful improvement, from illiteracy to Shakespeare and beyond, humanity is rushing to throw it all away. ...[T]here are harsh limits on what you can say with pictures. The written word is infinitely more adaptable. Thats why Greece rather than Egypt leapt forward and why Shakespeare was more articulate than the Aztecs." Emojis, being the invention of the Japanese, in whom politeness is hard-wired, are supposedly best suited for "softening" the tone of electronic messages, but that hasn't kept anti-Semitic groups from adopting the frog as a symbol of hate. And what mind in the gutter turned eggplant + peach into a vulgar expression for sexting? Maybe the Secret Service won't understand (The clown on top loves blowing his own horn) or ("Better to remain silent and be a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt" - Maurice Switzer), but do I really need to say in pictograms (Never eat sushi from a gas station) or (Can you play music loudly so I can use the toilet? BTW, "golden poo" = is a Japanese pun for "good luck," accounting for the smiley poo). How is better than "Beauty awakens the soul to act" (Dante)? Jones says "Speak Emoji if you want. Ill stick with the language of Shakespeare." I agree. (Hoping written words are not dead yet.)
Credits: NBK Design, Creative Tools (Flickr, Twitter bird), wordclouds.com
Process notes:
how to put emojis in word clouds https://ozone.oscraps.com/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=392556&title=how-to-put-emojis-in-word-clouds
For the journaling:
Since I don't have Photoshop CC 2017+ (which supports emojis in OpenType SVG fonts), I first typed a document in Mac TextEdit using the font and emojis I wanted. In Photoshop (CS5), I roughed out the placement of the journaling with line breaks in the same font. Then I edited my TextEdit document to get it to look the way I wanted, using the roughed-out info I'd developed in PS. I exported the TextEdit document to pdf and opened it in Photoshop (at 600 ppi, and I had to change the color profile from a default grayscale profile to a color profile at opening). The resulting layer had a transparent background and I dragged it into my LO as if it were a png.
