[HN Gopher] Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?
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Why does the "chart increasing" emoji show in red?
Author : adius
Score : 68 points
Date : 2022-01-25 18:45 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.emojipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.emojipedia.org)
| nlowell wrote:
| I'm red-green colorblind, and for this reason was never allowed
| in accounting at work. I kid, but it sure does surprise me that
| so much of the world uses red/green to visualize! Passive-
| aggressive fun fact: roughly 8% of men have some colorblindness.
| fouc wrote:
| 8% seems shockingly high, if that's true then it's also
| shocking how little effort seems to be made to compensate for
| colorblindness.
|
| Why aren't Emojis presented differently depending on type of
| colorblindness for example?
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _if that 's true then it's also shocking how little effort
| seems to be made to compensate for colorblindness._
|
| Note that making something accessible to colorblindness
| doesn't mean you can't use color, it means you can't use
| color to differentiate. So a graph with a red line is fine,
| as long as the color isn't what tells you if the movement is
| positive or negative (and the graph is the magnitude, if that
| makes sense).
|
| Red numbers on a excel sheet are probably fine too, as long
| as there is some other signifier on the cell that says "this
| is bad" (like parentheses or a negative sign).
|
| Green/Yellow/Red lights on a status dashboard can violate
| accessibility, unless there's text or a shape that goes along
| with it.
| Animats wrote:
| Chart-decreasing is mostly blue, but sometimes red and orange.
| Google had green for a while, but changed it.[1]
|
| [1] https://emojipedia.org/chart-decreasing/
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| maybe i am the only one who did see the cultural meanings as
| obvious but i was missing this information:
|
| reasoning western culture:
|
| blood > death > danger > warning
|
| reasoning in eastern culture:
|
| fire > energy > vitality > growth
| vangelis wrote:
| This title hurt my brain.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is kinda funny to see the trajectories that the different
| companies pick.
|
| Samsung is the only one that puts a little negative blip at the
| end of theirs.
|
| Apple shows a little blip at the beginning, followed by what
| appears to be endless, inevitable increase.
|
| From 2013-2015, Microsoft put stagnation toward the end of
| theirs, but then a tiny optimistic increasing trend at the end.
| However, starting in 2017 they decided theirs should look more
| like Apple's.
|
| Google is always optimistic in the long run but puts some bumps
| in the middle.
|
| Facebook minimally fulfills the requirement to draw a graph.
| Elidrake42 wrote:
| This doesn't seem to have a history, but a fun page to waste
| some time on none the less:
| https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f4b9
| silisili wrote:
| Thanks for that - I just wasted too much time comparing them
| all. It's interesting how a) companies are willing to
| maintain their own emojis rather than just borrow a standard,
| and b) the different approaches taken.
|
| I never really gave emojis much thought prior, but to me I
| seem to heavily favor FB's style. On the opposite end,
| ignoring whatever Gmail is, Samsung seems to put the least
| effort.
| amelius wrote:
| Eh, since COVID, graphs that are going down are interpreted as
| positive.
| section-9 wrote:
| TL;DR: Because emojis are of Japanese origin and (east)asian
| countries use red for profit and green for loss.
| zethus wrote:
| It goes a little bit deeper than this as well! Red is typically
| associated with fortune, luck, or prosperity for many Asian
| countries that were historically Chinese culture such as Japan
| and Korea. Think about any Lunar New Year celebration and the
| handing out of lucky money in red envelopes. The lines used in
| financial charts are actually are further classified as the
| "Yin Line" and "Yang Line", which you may know from the Taoist
| philosophy of Yin (literally "dark") and Yang (literally
| "light").
|
| So in this cultural sphere of influence, you'll most often see
| the positive lines as red (good/fortune/yang), and the negative
| line as either green, black, or blue (dark/bad/yin). [1][2]
|
| [1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/jdDPC.png [2]
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/w77KK.png
| deepfriedrice wrote:
| Random question: Why are there so many emoji "implementations"? I
| understand copyright, but is it really cheaper/easier/preferable
| for all these different companies to design their own emojis?
| qsort wrote:
| For the same reason that there are many fonts. Unicode only
| defines codepoints, like "UPSIDE-DOWN FACE U+1F643", similar to
| how it only defines "U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL A".
|
| I for one believe it was a very stupid idea to standardize
| emoji, but here we are.
| can16358p wrote:
| I think standardization opened a whole new way of
| communication but yeah some parts are messed up
| unethical_ban wrote:
| While emoji may seem trivial, I see no reason why it
| shouldn't be standardized. It is a widely used method of text
| communication with a large number of common symbols.
| csours wrote:
| If you like shapes and colors of charts, you may like the mobile
| game "The Firm"
| otras wrote:
| For a fun experiment, try Google finance with the Japanese
| language tag (https://www.google.com/finance/?hl=ja). Even
| knowing about the switched colors, it still fools my eyes. Goes
| to show how deeply ingrained the usual red/green assignment is!
| ikornaselur wrote:
| Wait till /r/wallstreetbets finds out about this!
| jancsika wrote:
| It's because they're tracking crypto prices.
| d--b wrote:
| Well the "chart decreasing" emoji is blue. So that whole thing
| about Japanese stock exchange is wrong...
| rdlw wrote:
| If these colour meanings are older than ~80 years (presumably
| they are), then maybe the association is between _aka_ (red)
| for increases and _ao_ (grue) for decreases, or in English,
| both green and blue for decreases.
| ldjb wrote:
| It depends on the font. Some fonts have it in red, some in
| blue, some in green, some in orange. I think it's reasonable to
| think that cultural differences played a part in the variety of
| colours used by different fonts.
|
| They seem to be gravitating towards blue (specifically, the
| colour most westerners consider blue), though.
|
| https://emojipedia.org/chart-decreasing/
| contravariant wrote:
| Are you sure? The Japanese conflate blue and green all the
| time.
| Splendor wrote:
| > Meanwhile, green is used to represent decreases in stock value.
|
| Okay. Now explain why the "chart decreasing" emoji is blue
| instead of green.
| ptx wrote:
| Possibly because the word for blue in Japanese (Qing i) can
| also mean green.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Are there localized "fonts" for emoji? i.e. Could Apple display
| the chart in green on iPhones with western system languages, and
| red on iPhones with Japanese set as the language? Surely this is
| not the only example where different cultures conceptualize the
| concepts behind emoji differently. Another (potentially touchy)
| example would be automatically adding / removing a hijab for
| emoji featuring women in Arabic iPhones.
| devmunchies wrote:
| my thoughts exactly. another example would be the "Japanese
| post office"[1] which has a symbol "@" for japanese postal
| mark. There is a "european post office"[2] emoji as well with a
| brass horn on it. Both are meaningless to North and South
| Americans (correct me if I'm wrong).
|
| [1]: https://emojipedia.org/japanese-post-office/ [2]:
| https://emojipedia.org/european-post-office/
|
| note: notice how /european-post-office redirects to /post-
| office
| bee_rider wrote:
| The Japanese post office symbol could almost be a Tesla
| dealership, to American eyeballs.
| paxys wrote:
| The answer to this is kinda complicated.
|
| In general terms, it is Apple's OS, and they can do whatever
| they want on it - so yes, they could display a green chart in
| some countries. I don't think any platform does something like
| this today, but it wouldn't be too crazy to add.
|
| If we want to talk standards, the Unicode Consortium defines
| the emoji set as well as loose guidelines on how they should be
| displayed. The platform implementing them is free to choose the
| specific designs and pixels, however, so nothing wrong with a
| red or green chart (or both).
|
| Going into technical details, an emoji is a unicode character
| (or set of characters). There can't be different "emoji
| languages" since emoji _is_ a language. There can be fonts that
| render different emojis differently, but it would be
| interesting /weird to interplay that with regular text fonts
| that you may otherwise use in the same document. And then do
| you allow users to switch emoji fonts? Or use different emoji
| fonts at the same time in the same block of text?
| yongjik wrote:
| Funnily enough, the Japanese word for "(business) deficit" is
| literally "red letters" (Chi Zi ):
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%B5%A4%E5%AD%97
|
| (Wiktionary says it was borrowed from English - no idea if it's
| true.)
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| Interesting! Similarly, in English we would say that a business
| was "in the red" if its expenditures exceeded its income. (Or
| something like that. It's a colloquialism, so it doesn't really
| have a specific technical meaning.)
| goodcanadian wrote:
| This is because losses were traditionally written in red ink
| back when books were done on paper. Profits were in black ink
| which is why profitable businesses are sometimes referred to
| as "in the black."
| k1t wrote:
| When I see that emoji I think of a sales chart, not stocks. I
| feel like the sales charts are usually red, even when increasing
| - presumably becauseit stands out.
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(page generated 2022-01-25 23:00 UTC)