For years, they sat upon the keyboards of Android devices and Google Hangouts like eccentric, amorphous blobs of cookie dough dropped casually onto a baking sheet. Their faces were an unpredictable rainbow of human emotions, featuring mouths that tilted up and down in imprecise, handwritten dashes. First introduced in the spring of 2013, these quirky characters quickly amassed a passionate following, drawing an equal and vocal share of devoted acolytes and vocal haters across the digital landscape.
Now, however, that chapter of digital design history has officially closed. As part of its sweeping Android Oreo software update, Google has retired the beloved blobs, replacing them with symmetrical circles and much more standardized, human-like figures.
The update marks the most significant visual overhaul that Google has made to its native emoji set in years. Yet, this massive transformation did not happen overnight. Emoji—much like the complex human experiences, objects, and emotions they are designed to represent—are living artifacts that continuously evolve over time. Transforming the unique shape, color, and cultural meaning of the original blob was a lengthy, deliberate process that arguably began the exact moment Google’s blob emoji were born nearly half a decade ago.
The Evolution of an Emoji Landscape
When Google’s design teams originally conceived the blobs nearly five years ago, the broader digital emoji landscape had already begun to coalesce and standardize around the perfectly round, glossy circles popularized by Apple on iOS. By comparison, Android’s native emoji selection felt delightfully kooky, standing out for their idiosyncratic artistic direction.
"I had a Japanese code name for them: ponyon," recalls Satoe Haile, a designer at Google who helped conceptualize the blob alongside the contracted Japanese design firm IC4.
The term ponyon loosely translates to the "sound of something bouncing," which aptly described the emoji’s jubilant, non-human form and bouncy nature. The designers intentionally illustrated the blobs so that they would remain lighthearted and expressive, retaining a sense of charm even when their faces were displaying grumpy, confused, or sad expressions. "We wanted to create something cute," Haile explains, reflecting on the initial creative goals of the project.
At the time, this winking, unconventional attitude made complete sense for the platform. It was 2013, and emoji had not yet transformed into the culturally loaded, high-stakes graphics that they represent in modern digital communication. It would be another full year before emoji would make a formal appearance in an official White House economic report, and two years before the face with tears of joy emoji would be named Oxford Dictionaries’ official Word of the Year.
However, soon after the blobs first made their debut on user devices, the way everyday people utilized emoji began to shift dramatically.
"We noticed that emoji were no longer these cutesy, highly-branded things that everybody could go out and design in crazy ways," says Gus Fonts, a product manager for Android. "But rather, they’d become this really essential tool for communication."
Cross-Platform Confusion and the Push for Standardization
That fundamental shift in user behavior made the blob’s uniquely asymmetrical design a distinct liability for clear communication across different hardware platforms and operating systems. There was simply no guarantee that an emoji sent from a Google Nexus 7 device would look anything like the symbol the recipient would ultimately see on their Apple iPhone, and vice versa.
In some instances, this lack of cross-platform standardization led to comical or frustrating misunderstandings. For a period of time, the broken heart emoji on iOS would inexplicably render as a pink, hairy heart on Android devices. Something fundamental clearly had to change to prevent miscommunication in everyday text messages and chats.
Google designers began tweaking the blob emoji in subtle ways to improve clarity. First, Google made the features within their expressions much clearer and more pronounced. Then, in 2015, the company unified the chaotic blob variations into a single gumdrop silhouette and reoriented every single emoji so that they faced directly forward toward the viewer.
"We tried to make the expressions more orthographic so there was no confusion or conflation with direction," says Rachel Been, a creative director at Google. Because emoji are purely graphical forms of communication, any visual decision can be easily misinterpreted; a blob leaning to the left could accidentally communicate something entirely different than one standing upright.
Concurrently, the Unicode Consortium started to push for significantly more realism, inclusivity, and representation across all digital emoji sets. Ongoing global debates surrounding emoji gender options and diverse skin tones proved exceptionally complicated for Google, whose signature yellow blobs were intentionally designed to be racially and physically neutral.
"If you want to do skin tones, it would look pretty weird to do them on blobs," notes Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia and an active member of the Unicode emoji subcommittee.
In response to these industry-wide shifts, Google introduced human figures and optional skin tones in a major 2016 software update—an important and necessary first step. Yet, these more realistic, human-based emoji still lived side-by-side with the legacy blob expressions within the keyboard. To many people working within Google, there was an unmistakable visual discordance between the two distinct styles, prompting the company to deeply reconsider the blob’s long-term place in its emoji ecosystem.
"At no point in time did someone storm into a room and say the blobs must go," Gus Fonts recalls of the internal deliberations. Like most large technology corporations, Google moves with a deliberate, measured pace. Transitioning away from the beloved blob required nearly two years of intensive meetings, creative design sprints, and endless iterations until the new squishy circle finally landed on user phones.
Entering the Era of the Squishy Circle
From the very beginning of the redesign process, Been and her dedicated team of designers knew they wanted to construct every single emoji on a simple, unified grid framework. This structural foundation allowed them to swap reusable components—such as standardized eyes and mouth styles—consistently and quickly between different emoji categories.
As for the core shape itself, Been wanted to create a visual form that was symmetrical without feeling austere or overly rigid.
"We wanted to give it a simple shape that was symmetrical so you don’t have to think about the shape, so you’re purely looking at the facial characteristics," she explains, noting that the new designs still maintain a playful connection to their predecessors. "They have little homages to the blob. They’re not perfectly circles—they’re a little squishy."
Digital emoji must convey a tremendous amount of emotional context within a very small visual space. A clean, simple shape makes it significantly easier for users to rapidly scroll through a crowded set of more than 2,000 emoji to find the exact character they are looking for. It also makes it much easier for designers to accessorize emoji with hats, props, or other elements, which has become a growing trend heavily driven by Unicode updates.
"Think of the ‘mind blown’ emoji," Been points out. "That was very difficult to do well with a gumdrop shape."
Unlike Apple, whose emoji have progressively grown more realistic, detailed, and dimensional with almost every major software update, Google deliberately opted to retain the clean, flat aesthetic of the original blobs. They developed a fresh base color palette loosely tied to Material Design, the company’s corporate design language, and added a subtle outline around each individual emoji to ensure they stand out clearly against both light and dark background colors.
While this level of visual minutia might seem inconsequential to casual users, Google developed its new system completely from the ground up to ensure that future designers will be able to easily update and adapt the emoji set as design standards shift in the future.
"Thirty years down the line when we still have emoji, we’re not going to have the same designers making the set," Been notes.
The design of emoji will inevitably continue to change as hardware evolves. Phone screens will inevitably improve, and today’s illustrations will eventually look dated. Meanwhile, the cultural meanings of emoji, much like spoken and written words, will continue to evolve alongside human culture, just as they have always done.
Four years ago, the quirky blob felt like the right artistic choice for Android. Today, it is the squishy circle taking its place on screens worldwide. In the future, who knows what form they will take? But the odds are high that somewhere down the line, digital emoji will once again look completely different.
