Here's A Guide To The Best New Emoji Technology

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With calls for more diverse and specific designs, last month's major update to the Unicode Consortium, and an emoji-only social network on the way, there's little doubt that emoji have become prime players in a nascent pictographic vocabulary.

With new apps, websites and designs hitting the web, enabling detailed, customizable, and unique emoji that push the limits of the ideogrammatic language ever further, from the ethnically diverse emojis of iROC, to Imoji— the DIY emoji-maker turning selfies into smileys— here's a guide to are some of the most recent & important developments in emoji technology.

Be they a perfectly timed selfie or a picture of a cat, this app lets you create your own emojis from slices of your favorite pictures. Simply put, if your camera can capture it, it can become an emoji. According to an interview with Forbes, Tom Smith, one of the app's six founding members, projects that the service will become "a more flexible and creative form of communication, one which adds a new dimension to a text message."The question here is whether these stickers even count as emoji, or whether they're just downscaled picture messages. Download the iOS-only app here, and decide for yourself.

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From OKFocus, the makers of the Aubrey Graham photo manipulation app, Drake Shake, emoticon generator Newmoticon puts together random series of symbols— usually arranged like a cute character's face— for users to name based on their associations with the text-based images. You're free to tweet using your newly named creation, or to tweet characters generated by "users like you," ensuring that the emoticon is preserved for posterity for those who need an easy way to say they're "Stupid Happy," most.

The brainchild of actor and comedian Orlando Jones, iROC is a reaction to the maligned lack of diversity within the emoji lexicon. This app offers an emoji selection that crosses genders and races, from celebrities like Bruce Lee and Maya Angelou, to symbols like Jesus, and a pile of money captioned "Make It Rain." On the Arsenio Hall Show, Jones explained the reasoning behind his new creation: "We have a kid, and she grew up in a multicultural world, seeing all these various different things, and I want her to feel like she's represented." According to its website, the app will continue to release more emojis over time, in the best effortws towards balancing out the growing institution of icon-based communication.

When it comes to the the Hi-Art sticker and emoji app, incorporating modern artists into modern communication is the name of the game. According to the app description, the artists featured within its extensive library include Ghostface Killah, Dan Santoro, and Ron English, and we've also seen glimpses of Salvador Dali and René Magritte on the app's Twitter page. The wide range of artists and objects involved in this project aren't just good for easy art references, they may likely be one key to emotionally connecting the texting generation to centuries of art history. What better way to say, "I miss you," than a text of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam?

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The intentionally misspelled text associated with the Seinfeld2000 parody Twitter account has made its way out of the English language and into emoji. Alongside @Seinfeld2000, designer Kevin McCauley carefully crafted over 40 symbols, including "Jery, Gerge, Elane, Krame, the Little Jery, the back of Gerge Stenbranner's head, the Pez Dispenser, Tim Whatley as Waltar White, the Cashmere Sweatar, and whole case of Today Sponge." Since using Seinfeld emojis is easier than trying to work a comment about salty pretzels into everyday conversation, featuring everything from Coachella headliners to Juggalos, it's never been easier than ever to reference the ultimate post-modern product of the 90's,

If you don't find a face that suits you over at iROC, then you might have better luck with iDiversicons. The brainchild of former NASA project manager Katrina Parrott, over 900 multicultural characters are now the disposal of both iOS and Android users. From married couples of varying genders and sexual preferences, to even dogs of varying breeds Parrott seems to be looking for a new frontier outside of the space program— the final frontier of equality on the Internet— and finding it in cartoon people.

In addition to the above, with the 250 new emoji characters that have been added in the Unicode 7.0 update. Featuring such additions as "Derelict House Building," "slightly frowning face," and "hot pepper," texters everywhere are primed for a renaissance in these post-modern hieroglyphics. Check out our Rundown Of The Most Mysterious New Emoji, for a more complete guide to the new characters set to debut across smartphones this Fall, and stay tuned for the forthcoming debut of Emojili, the emoji-only social network.

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