Five artwork sets, chosen by licence rather than by taste

Open any emoji page on this site and you get the same character drawn five ways: Twemoji, Noto Emoji, OpenMoji, Fluent Emoji and Blobmoji. That list is almost certainly missing whichever set you actually use every day. The one rendering on your phone as you read this is probably not on it.

That is not an oversight, and it is not a judgement about which drawings are better. It is a licensing constraint, and it is worth explaining, because it determines what this site is able to show you and it explains several otherwise-baffling holes in the data.

The constraint

A reference site does not merely display emoji artwork the way your browser displays a font. It copies the image files onto its own server and serves them to strangers. That is redistribution, and redistribution needs permission.

The emoji sets most people recognise are proprietary. They ship inside an operating system or an app, under terms that let you use them on the device they came with — and not under terms that let a third party extract the image files, host them, and publish them alongside a licence notice. There is no permission to be had on request, either; these are shipped assets, not licensed libraries. A reference site that wanted to show them would have to infringe, or screenshot them and infringe slightly differently.

So this site does not show them. Not a single proprietary set, not a single screenshot, not a single “for comparison” exception.

What is left, and on what terms

Five sets publish their source artwork under a licence that permits redistribution. That is the entire selection criterion, and here is what each one asks for in return:

• Twemoji — artwork under CC BY 4.0, with the repository’s own tooling under MIT. Attribution required.
• Noto Emoji — the SVG artwork under Apache 2.0. The compiled font is under SIL OFL 1.1, which this site does not use; it takes the SVGs.
• OpenMoji — CC BY-SA 4.0. Attribution and share-alike: a work adapted from the artwork has to carry a compatible licence itself.
• Fluent Emoji — MIT.
• Blobmoji — follows Noto’s split, which it states explicitly in its own README: OFL for the font, Apache 2.0 for the artwork and tooling.

Every one of the five requires attribution as a condition of use. This is why the licenses page is not a courtesy page tucked into the footer. It is the term under which the artwork on every other page is allowed to be there at all. Take that page away and the rest of the site stops being licensed.

Consequence one: the coverage is uneven, and you can see it

Proprietary sets are drawn by a funded team against a shipping deadline, so they tend to cover everything. Openly licensed sets vary enormously. Counting the artwork files actually present in this site’s repository, against 3,963 emoji records:

• Twemoji — 3,944
• Noto Emoji — 3,944
• OpenMoji — 3,944
• Fluent Emoji — 3,145
• Blobmoji — 2,616

The first three are missing nineteen records each, and those nineteen are the whole of Emoji 18.0 — the newest release, which nobody has drawn yet. Set that aside and Twemoji, Noto and OpenMoji are complete.

Fluent is 818 short and Blobmoji is 1,347 short, and those are not the same kind of gap at all.

Consequence two: the gaps have shapes

A missing-artwork count is a boring number. The distribution is not.

Fluent Emoji’s 818 gaps split into two clusters. 537 are in people-and-body, and 337 of those are the family subgroup alone — the long tail of two-parent, multi-child family combinations. The other 262 are flags, and this one is categorical rather than partial: Fluent ships no country flags and no subdivision flags whatsoever. That is 259 country flags and 3 subdivision flags, all absent by design. It does draw the eight generic flags — chequered flag, triangular flag and so on — because those are ordinary pictures rather than national symbols. Whatever the reasoning, it is a deliberate line, not an unfinished backlog.

Blobmoji’s 1,347 gaps are shaped completely differently. 1,208 of them are in people-and-body, and 1,059 of the total are skin-tone variants. Blobmoji is a community fork that revives Google’s older rounded “blob” design, and it is maintained by one person against an emoji standard that has been expanding combinatorially for years. Its gap is not a policy about flags; it is the arithmetic of a volunteer project meeting a spec that generates twenty-five records every time it adds one two-person gesture.

Neither of these is a bug in this site’s artwork resolver, which is why the vendor pages state the reason rather than presenting a bare percentage.

Consequence three: a repository’s licence is not one licence

Here is the detail that surprised this project most, and it is the reason the licenses page has a section nobody would think to write from the outside.

Neither Noto Emoji nor Blobmoji draws its own country flags. Both vendor a third_party/region-flags bundle inside the repository, and that bundle carries its own LICENSE file, separate from the Apache 2.0 that covers the rest of the artwork. 262 of the flag files this site serves for Noto come from that bundle, and 258 of Blobmoji’s do.

A repository’s top-level LICENSE does not automatically cover every file inside it. If you are going to redistribute artwork on the strength of a licence, “the repo says Apache 2.0” is not the end of the check. It is the beginning of one.

What this means when you are reading a page

The five drawings on an emoji page are not five renderings of one picture. There is no master picture. Unicode assigns a codepoint and a one-line name, and five independent groups of people read that name and draw what they think it means. They are five interpretations of a sentence.

Which makes the disagreements the interesting part. Where all five converge, the name was unambiguous. Where they diverge — and they do, often — the name left room, and you are looking at five people’s different guesses about what was meant. That comparison is the thing this site is actually for, and it only exists because five groups chose a licence that let anyone put their work side by side.

One last disclosure, since this post is about licence compliance: the artwork here is not redrawn or recoloured. Each SVG is run through SVGO to strip comments and editor metadata and to drop the baked-in pixel dimensions so it can scale from CSS. No path, point or colour is touched. That is still a modification, so it is named on the licenses page rather than left implicit.