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Caterina889

: Why are Yahoo's emoticon's more effective at conveying emotion than others? What do you think are the objective features of Yahoo's well known emoticon set, that they use for mail, instant messaging

@Caterina889

Posted in: #Icon #InterfaceDesign

What do you think are the objective features of Yahoo's well known emoticon set, that they use for mail, instant messaging etc., that make them so much better at communicating user's feelings and subjectively look so much better than most other emoticon sets seen on the web or in desktop software?

(Explanation: I thought I was the only one liking the Yahoo emoticons much more than all the other emoticon sets on the web, but I asked a great number of regular user's and they all feel the same. On an imaginary 1 to 10 scale of evaluating emoticons based on "looking good", being "easy to understand" and actually having a way to "graphically communicate emotions", Gmail's square emoticons would probably rate 0, the other emoticon sets from Gmail would be somewhere like below 5, together with the annoying overly animated ones that some people get from weird email clients of adware-ish toolbars, the Skype and MS ones would be somewhere at 5 and Yahoo's would be much higher than all the other's, let's say at 10. And I want to understand what makes this particular set of little faces so much more appealing (especially to white European and American users).)

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@Pope1402555

I personally don't find emoticons appealing, but it's clear to me that someone who loves them has gone to a lot of trouble with these. If you look at them closely, you'll see alot of care given to the coloring and shading, plus all the the "cutesy" tricks of no nose (usually), large eyes, exaggerated expressions and so forth. They chose very well known gestures as well, so no secret sauce there, but they used lots of animation frames, upping the quality ante (look at the number of frames used just to bring up the blush - that's not even all the frames in the animation). Most folks, if they animate, do one or two on/off frames and call it a day.

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