Sloth Emoji
Earlier this month, I was curious about what emoji's were proposed and approved for Unicode approval this year... and realized that there was no sloth included. Naturally, I opted to address this.
My online research lead to a Twitter post by Bodo Tasche about his recent submission for a full-body sloth emoji. This elated me of course, but there was still room for a sloth-head feature... which hadn't been included in Bodo's submission criteria. Thus, I went to work reviewing the Unicode submission guidelines and designing my own variations, based on existing animal head styles, such as the koala, monkey, bear and pig, featured below.
Observing the 72 x 72 pixel criteria guidelines and image search samples of sloth photos, I created four variations of a basic sloth face emoji.
After taking care of the fun part, I then decided to tackle the paperwork... after reviewing the criteria and submission methods. This brought me to Emojination.org, who then kindly referred me Bodo himself.
Turns out that the international creation of an emoji character is actually extremely complicated and thorough, and only a few are selected for inclusion each year. Thus, not only did I have to make the cute vector faces above, but also had to submit linear black and white versions too.
Bodo helped with the formal side of the submission, as well as the data compilation, much of which he'd already done, and could be recycled or easily referenced.
2020 UPDATE!
BEHOLD - THE TIME HAS COME!
THERE IS A SLOTH EMOJI!
Bodo has succeeded!! Sloth was approved as part of Unicode 12.0 in 2019 and added to Emoji 12.0 in 2019.
These are the available OS Sloth Emoji variants, from left to right, top to bottom: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, Joypixels, OpenMoji and Emojipedia.