For years, they sat upon the keyboards of Android devices and within Google Hangouts like eccentric digital relics. First appearing in the spring of 2013, Google’s original emoji characters were roundly amorphous, bearing a striking resemblance to dollops of cookie dough hastily dropped onto a baking sheet. Their faces were a vibrant rainbow of whimsical emotions, featuring mouths that turned up and down in imprecise, hand-drawn dashes.
Over the course of several years, these peculiar little figures—affectionately or critically known simply as "blobs"—amassed a passionate community of both vocal haters and fiercely loyal acolytes across the internet. But that digital era has officially drawn to a close. As part of its rollout for the Android Oreo operating system, Google permanently retired the beloved blobs, replacing them with a standardized set of symmetrical circles and far more conventional, human-like figures.
This sweeping overhaul marks the single largest visual and structural change that Google has made to its emoji catalog in years. Yet, the transformation did not happen overnight. Emoji are much like the very objects, concepts, and human expressions they are designed to represent—they continuously evolve. Completely transforming the blob’s shape, color, and fundamental communicative meaning was a lengthy, deliberate process that arguably began the exact moment Google’s blob emoji were first conceived.
Emoji Evolution and the Birth of the ‘Ponyon’
When Google originally designed the blobs nearly half a decade ago, the broader digital emoji landscape had already begun to coalesce around the uniform, perfectly round yellow circles popularized by Apple on iOS. By direct comparison, Android’s native emoji set was delightfully kooky, standing out for its unconventional aesthetic choices.
"I had a Japanese code name for them: ponyon," recalls Satoe Haile, a designer at Google who, alongside the contracted Japanese design firm IC4, helped conceptualize the original blob characters. The term ponyon roughly translates to the "sound of something bouncing," which aptly described the emoji’s jubilant, non-human, and fluid form. The design team intentionally illustrated the blobs so that they would remain lighthearted and expressive, even when their faces were conveying grumpy, frustrated, or deeply sad emotions. "We wanted to create something cute," Haile explains, reflecting on the initial creative goals of the project.
At the time, this casual, winking design philosophy made complete sense for the technology landscape. It was 2013, and emoji were not yet the culturally loaded, globally scrutinized graphics that they have become today. It would still be another full year before emoji would make an appearance in an official White House economic report, and two years before the face with tears of joy emoji would be named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2015.
Soon after the blobs first captured the public imagination, however, the fundamental ways in which 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."
That cultural and practical shift rapidly made the blob’s unique, non-standardized design a significant liability for cross-platform digital communication. There was simply no guarantee that an emoji sent from a Google Nexus 7 device to a friend would render as the same graphic when viewed on an Apple iPhone, and vice versa. As a notable example of the interoperability chaos of the era, the pile of poo emoji on iOS frequently transformed into a pink, hairy heart when received on an Android device. Clearly, something substantial had to change to maintain message clarity.
Google designers quietly began tweaking the blob emoji in subtle ways to address these growing pains. First, Google made the features within their expressions much clearer and more visually pronounced. Then, in a 2015 update, the company unified the disparate blob shapes into a single, cohesive gumdrop silhouette and reoriented every single emoji so that they faced directly forward.
"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 design decision runs the risk of being misinterpreted by the recipient; a blob leaning heavily to the left, for instance, could easily mean something entirely different than one standing upright and centered.
Simultaneously, the Unicode Consortium started to heavily push for greater realism, inclusivity, and representation within the global emoji standard. Ongoing debates surrounding emoji gender diversity and skin tone options proved exceptionally complicated for Google, whose iconic 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," points out Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia and a key member of the Unicode emoji subcommittee.
In response to these industry pressures, a 2016 software update saw Google introduce recognizable human figures and optional skin tones—an important and necessary first step. Yet, these more realistic emoji still lived side-by-side with the legacy blob expressions within the keyboard. To many people working within Google, there was a clear visual and conceptual 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," Fonts recalls of the internal deliberations. Like most large technology corporations, Google moves with a deliberate, measured pace. Transitioning completely away from the iconic blob took nearly two years of continuous meetings, intensive design sprints, and endless iterations, ultimately culminating in the squishy circles that roll out to users today.
Enter the Squishy Circle
From the very beginning of the redesign project, Been and her dedicated team of designers knew they wanted to build every single new emoji upon a simple, uniform structural grid. This foundational approach allowed them to swap reusable modular parts—such as distinct eyes and mouth styles—consistently and quickly between different character types without losing visual cohesion.
As for the core shape itself, Been wanted to create something that was entirely symmetrical without feeling cold or austere. "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. "They have little homages to the blob. They’re not perfectly circular—they’re a little squishy."
Digital emoji inherently possess very little physical screen space to convey a large amount of emotional and contextual message. Establishing a simple, reliable shape makes it significantly easier for users to rapidly scroll through a crowded set of more than 2,000 individual emoji to find the exact character they are looking for. It also makes it drastically easier for designers to accessorize emoji with hats, props, or hand gestures, accommodating a rapidly growing design trend driven by the Unicode Consortium. "Think of the ‘mind blown’ emoji," Been notes. "That was very difficult to do well with a gumdrop shape."
Unlike Apple, whose native emoji have progressively grown more realistic, detailed, and dimensional with almost every major software update, Google deliberately opted to retain the clean, two-dimensional flatness of the original blobs. The design team created a base color palette that is loosely connected to Material Design, the company-wide design language, and thoughtfully added a slight outline around each individual emoji to ensure they stand out clearly against varied background colors.
While this level of visual minutia might seem inconsequential to the casual texter, Google developed its entire new system from the ground up to ensure that future designers will be able to easily update the emoji set as design standards inevitably shift. "Thirty years down the line when we still have emoji, we’re not going to have the same designers making the set," Been observes.
The reality is that emoji designs will continue to change over time. Phone screens will undoubtedly improve in resolution, and current digital illustrations will eventually look dated. Meanwhile, the semantic meanings of emoji, much like spoken and written words, will continue to evolve alongside human culture, just as they always have.
Four years ago, the quirky, bouncing blob felt like the right fit for a rapidly expanding mobile platform. Today, it is the standardized squishy circle. In the distant future, who knows what form digital communication will take? But the history of digital iconography suggests that somewhere down the line, emoji will once again look completely different.
