10.9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

I'm Bethany Van Delfth, and this is no ordinary episode of the 10 News.

This is the 10 News Gets Extra.

This Saturday, we're talking emojis.

Did you ever wonder how an emoji gets made?

We did, and we went to an expert on the topic, Jennifer Daniel, chair of the emoji subcommittee at the Unicode Consortium. There is an emoji subcommittee.

Nice. Show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan got the full scoop on exploding heads and boomerangs

in our full interview. Check it out.

Welcome. Thank you for joining us today on the 10 News.

We're really excited to have you here.

We've been bouncing emojis back and forth on the team in preparing for this interview today. Can you introduce yourself to our listeners and then tell us what you do? Hi, my name is

Jennifer Daniel and I am the chair of the emoji subcommittee for the Unicode Technical Committee,

which is part of the Unicode Consortium. And I make emoji. I also work at Google and And at Google, I make emoji. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of overlap there.

I'd love for you to explain to our listeners, what exactly is the Unicode consortium and who's on it?

So Unicode is a volunteer-based organization and they're responsible for encoding the world's languages.

So you could think, like basically, they're the reason that if you send a message in Hindi from one device, the person you're sending it to can read it in Hindi.

Before Unicode existed, that was a real problem.

People couldn't communicate in their native tongues around the world. So think of it this way, right?

Every letter on the screen that you read, whether it be a tablet or a computer or a phone or

anything that's in a digital space, every letter is assigned a code point.

So if you send someone face palm emoji, the code point for face palm is U1F 926, right?

So emoji, even though they look like pictures, are really a font.

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