Discourse was the first to adopt us even before Emoji One officially launched. I thank and value Jeff and the Discourse community for that!
I wanted to share with you guys the latest smiley designs, which we finished TODAY. They follow unicode standards, so not all of them will match up with Apple (although most will). The style is flat, much like our 2014 renditions, and purposed to look sharp when scaled down.
I’m going to work my face off to earn our way back as the official discourse.org emoji set. We live and breathe these little guys, and won’t stop improving them until … well probably never actually. Our 2016 collection will be available to developers hopefully in November (of this year).
There are over 1,000 other emoji we’ll be releasing alongside these. You can preview some of the others at our new Instagram. Let me know your thoughts.
Hmm, those look pretty different to the previous versions. Have you considered renaming it to Emoji Two? <img src=https://d11a6trkgmumsb.cloudfront.net/images/emoji/emoji_one/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=0 width=40 height=40>
We’re very fortunate (and grateful) to be featured as the default. However, would be even cooler to be selected by the powers that be for their own Meta board. Much respect though, I do favor Twemoji over our 1st gen graphics.
The new release will be all emoji up to unicode 9.0 (all to date) plus skin tones. We’ll also have skin tones available for smileys as well, which would be a first from what I know.
The only thing that bothers me about the default set is that :) seems like a stronger version of :D where I’m used to it being the other way round. The default smiley should look more “happy” while the D version should be “laughing” iyswim.
Yeah, this was an unfortunate consequence of standardizing around existing sets. A new “slight smile” had to be created because the :) ended up being more of a xD, really. I still believe the shortcut :) in Discourse should map directly to “slight smile” rather than the open-mouthed “smile”.
I bumped into this, too. Looking at http://emojione.com/ I see all sorts of country flags but apparently Discourse has a version of the icon set that is not current? I know there’s been some discussion about upgrading here
it’s just that we have twemoji selected here
even though it should give you this one (much smaller though 
)
are correct: