For years, they sat on the keyboards of Android phones and inside Google Hangouts as the quirky, amorphous counterparts to Apple’s more lifelike illustrations. First appearing in the spring of 2013, they were roundly irregular, resembling little more than a dollop of cookie dough plopped onto a baking sheet. Their faces were a vibrant rainbow of emotions, boasting mouths that turned up and down in imprecise, handwritten dashes.
In the years that followed, these curious little characters amassed both fierce haters and intensely loyal acolytes across the digital landscape. But that debate has finally drawn to a close. As part of the Android Oreo software update, Google officially retired the beloved blobs, replacing them with symmetrical circles and more human-like figures.
The update marks the single largest visual overhaul Google has made to its native emoji set in years. Yet, the transformation did not happen overnight. Emoji—much like the myriad objects, emotions, and concepts they are designed to represent—evolve alongside human communication. Transforming the blob’s unconventional shape, distinctive color palette, and ultimate communicative meaning was a lengthy, deliberate process that arguably began the very moment Google’s blob emoji were born.
The Evolution of a Digital Icon
When Google first designed the blobs nearly half a decade ago, the global emoji landscape had already begun to coalesce around the uniform, perfectly round yellow circles popularized by iOS. By comparison, Android’s early emoji offerings were delightfully kooky and stood apart from industry standards.
"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. The term ponyon roughly translates to the "sound of something bouncing," which aptly described the emoji’s jubilant, non-human form. The design team intentionally illustrated the blobs so they would remain lighthearted, whimsical, and expressive, even when their digital faces were conveying grumpy, frustrated, or deeply sad emotions. "We wanted to create something cute," Haile explains.
At the time, this winking, playful attitude made complete sense for the platform. It was 2013, and emoji were not yet the culturally loaded, legally scrutinized graphics they are today. It would be another full year before emoji would officially show up in a White House economic report, and two years before the face with tears of joy would be crowned the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2015.
Soon after the blobs first captured the public imagination, however, the fundamental way everyday users communicated with 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 fundamental shift made the blob’s uniquely asymmetrical design a major liability for clear communication across different technological platforms. There was never any guarantee that a thoughtful or humorous emoji sent to a friend from a Google Nexus 7 tablet would translate as intended into the image they ultimately saw on their iPhone, and vice versa. In the chaotic early days of cross-platform messaging, sending certain symbols—such as a simple kiss mark—could yield bizarre results, famously transforming into a pink, hairy heart on Android devices. Something fundamental had to change.
Google designers began tweaking the blob emoji in subtle, incremental ways. First, the team made the features within their expressions much clearer and more visually pronounced. Then, in a 2015 update, Google unified the sprawling family of blobs into a single, cohesive gumdrop silhouette and reoriented every individual emoji so they faced directly forward toward the user.
"We tried to make the expressions more orthographic so there was no confusion or conflation with direction," explains Rachel Been, a creative director at Google. Because emoji are purely graphical tools, any visual decision can be easily misinterpreted by the recipient; a blob leaning heavily to the left could accidentally imply something entirely different than one standing upright and centered.
Simultaneously, the Unicode Consortium—the international standards body governing digital text and symbols—started to push aggressively for greater realism, inclusivity, and human representation within the global emoji ecosystem. Debates surrounding complex topics like emoji gender diversity and skin tone proved particularly complicated for Google, whose iconic yellow blobs were intentionally neutral and non-human.
"If you want to do skin tones, it would look pretty weird to do them on blobs," notes Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia and a key member of the Unicode emoji subcommittee.
In response to these industry pressures, a 2016 software update introduced human figures and optional skin tones to Android—an important first step toward modern standardization. However, these more realistic, human-centric emoji still lived side-by-side with the legacy blob expressions. To many people working within Google, there was a clear and growing discordance between the two distinct art styles, prompting the company to seriously reconsider the blob’s ultimate place in its comprehensive emoji set.
"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 major multinational corporations, Google moves methodically. Transitioning completely away from the beloved blob required nearly two years of rigorous meetings, collaborative design sprints, and endless iterations before the final squishy circle was approved for mobile devices.
Enter the Squishy Circle
From the very beginning of the redesign process, Been and her dedicated team of designers knew they wanted to build every single emoji on a simple, uniform grid structure. This foundational choice allowed them to swap reusable modular parts—such as distinct eye styles and mouth configurations—consistently and efficiently across different characters.
As for the core shape itself, Been wanted to engineer something that was geometrically 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 says. "They have little homages to the blob. They’re not perfectly circle—they’re a little squishy."
Digital emoji occupy very limited screen real estate to convey a massive range of human thoughts and emotions. A simple, standardized shape makes it significantly easier for users to scroll rapidly through a set of more than 2,000 distinct emoji to find the exact symbol they need. It also makes it vastly easier for designers to accessorize emoji with hats, props, or hand gestures—a rapidly growing trend heavily encouraged by the Unicode Consortium.
"Think of the ‘mind blown’ emoji," Been points out. "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 nearly every major software update, Google deliberately opted to retain the clean, flat aesthetic of the original blobs. They crafted a cohesive base color palette loosely connected to Material Design, the company-wide design language, and added a subtle outline around each individual emoji to guarantee they would stand out clearly against both light and dark backgrounds.
While this visual minutia might seem inconsequential to the casual observer, Google developed its new system completely from the ground up to ensure that future generations of designers will be able to easily update and adapt the emoji set as communication standards inevitably change.
"Thirty years down the line when we still have emoji, we’re not going to have the same designers making the set," Been notes.
And the emoji designs will undoubtedly change again. Phone screens and display technologies will continue to improve, and today’s digital illustrations will eventually look dated. Meanwhile, the meaning of emoji, much like spoken and written words, will continue to evolve alongside human culture, just as it always has.
Four years ago, the quirky, bouncing blob felt entirely right for the digital era. Today, the torch has been passed to the symmetrical, squishy circle. 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.
