One of the least noticed features in Apple's jam-packed event on April 20 was the addition of a dedicated key on all new keyboards that opens the emoji selector. Right now, to get the emoji picker on a Mac, you have to remember the key combination Command-Control-Space bar. On Windows, it's the Windows key plus the semicolon. I can never seem to plant either of those combos in my brain–I have to Google them every time (like just now)–so the new dedicated key seems like a huge win.

Technically, it's up to computing platform owners, like Apple for the Mac and iPhone, Google for Android, and Microsoft for Windows to create and update the emojis that appear on our devices. But they all use the standard set of emojis from the Unicode Consortium, the group that has long established how keyboard setups in different languages interface with computers. As we noted last month, Google designer Jennifer Daniel now heads the consortium's emoji subcommittee that revises the emoji collection annually. I spoke to her this week about the challenges of picking which new little cartoons make it onto billions of keyboards and which don't.

Before joining Google five years ago, Daniel was a designer in the world of journalism as a graphics editor at the New York Times and graphics director of Bloomberg Businessweek. She always loved emojis and first went public with her ideas in an essay in the Times in 2014 called "The Emojis We Really Need," which she later followed up with an art gallery showing of "Emojis I wish existed."

"The best part is how accessible it is," she explained to me in a video call. "It isn't high art. I'm not here with a monocle on to talk to you about fine art. It really was just about exploring what could be done."

Along with the op-ed, Daniel started taking the emoji world more seriously and filing formal applications with Unicode to propose new emojis. A concept to represent existentialism, a person seeing their reflection in a mirror, didn't make it. But the smiling face with a tear, or a tear of joy, is now on all our keyboards. After she'd been at Google working on emojis for a few years, she joined the subcommittee in 2018 and when longtime chairman (and Unicode president) Mark Davis stepped aside a little over a year ago, she got the top post.

Anyone who fills out the proper forms can submit an emoji proposal. The subcommittee has a variety of criteria it uses to pick 30 or so new additions per year. "We are focusing primarily on communicative aspects of emoji, since they primarily are used in messaging spaces," Daniel says. New emoji also should reflect "globally relevant concepts," which can be something meaningful to everyone in the world or just a specific group.

The future, though, may be about letting people break out of the confines of the consortium's emoji list. While there's a standard way to include an image on a web page with HTML code, there's no standard way to include a small image in every messaging app and word processor document. Some apps like Slack and Discord already allow groups to add their own small icons to use as emojis.

"Unicode can't do everything so we're trying to find new encoding paths," she says. "Language is developed by just human minds interacting with each other. It's unstoppable. And finding a way for that to be translated in digital spaces is just top of mind."