The hopes and wishes of a nation, and one very vocal brand, have finally been answered: today Unicode officially released the 8.0 update, which includes a taco emoji.
Not only is the taco included, but we also get a burrito, hot dog, popcorn, and a wedge of cheese, so we will not go hungry any time soon. Some other notable additions include:
- bottle with popping cork
- unicorn face
- turkey
- volleyball
- face with rolling eyes
- face with thermometer
- nerd face
- robot face
- sign of the horns
- crab
- lion face
- mosque
- menorah
The full list of new available icons can be found here. Friends, I apologize in advance but you are going to see me making liberal use of the 'face with rolling eyes' and the 'sign of the horns' rock and roll salute.
Remember though, these characters are now included in the language, but we don't know when the different platforms will offer support for them. Apple just updated their emoji a few months ago with iOS 8.3, when they included the skin tone modifiers for nearly all of the people emoji. They have not, however announced any timeline for introducing the taco into the fold. We may have better chances with some of the other platforms that have not yet updated their emoji support this year.
One thing I will say is that as we grow our emoji library, I am going to be looking for a better keyboard. I've given the new iOS infinite horizontal scroll keyboard enough time that I should have it memorized by now, but I am still spending far too long looking for the glasses or the artists palette, which feel buried. I think eventually we might have to move to a predictive text model, lest we spend hours trying to find the right emoji to order dinner; Domino's just announced it would accept emoji orders via text. 🍕
Cara Rose DeFabio is a pop addicted, emoji fluent, transmedia artist, focusing on live events as an experience designer for Real Future.