This gist contains a copy of my comment to a Medium article named Designing in the Open(Source) published by Microsoft Design (official account).
The article is about Fluent Emoji -- a collection of emoji from Microsoft. They are kind of a big deal because they are included with every copy of Windows operating system as a Segoe UI Emoji font.
I very much like the aestetics of some of those emojis but there is something about this font which strikes me as illogical, impractical, and just plain wrong -- the font does not include any national flags.
So, imagine your iPhone emoji keyboard without the country flags. WTF, right?! 😈 This is what Windows users have to live with.
It appears that the reason for not including the national flags into the emoji font distributed with Windows was a (well-intentioned) desire to avoid offending some people (read: governments) who believe that a certain national flag (read: the country and its people) should not exist. International recognition of nation states is a somewhat sensitive subject. So at some point someone at Microsoft decided to sidestep the politics of it by not including any national flags at all!
The consequences of that decision still cause daily frustration to great many Windows users. I think there is no good reason why it should continue this way.
Medium doesn't make it easy to share links to specific comments 🫤 and I needed an easy reference for further discussions so I created this gist.
With all due respect, country flags should not be on that list.
The situation with national flag emojis in Windows is as tragic as it is unnecessary and counter-productive. There are tens of thousands of complaints and discussions of this topic online.
National flags cannot be trademarked in most jurisdictions. See [1] for a more comprehensive analysis.
But I am not trying to make a legal case for it as I am not a lawyer. I will simply mention three facts that go against the narrative:
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Apple has national flags in their font. And they seem to be doing all right internationally. And so does Google in Android as far as I know. They also seem to get away with it somehow. But not Microsoft because... reasons? 🫤
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Microsoft Windows includes Maps application which displays national borders. A non-trivial number of these borders is hotly contested, often with the use of deadly force. In fact, a printout from a wrong part of Maps can get you killed in a few particularly sad and violent parts of the world. And despite the controversies and endless conflicts surrounding them, borders are displayed in Maps. Now that I said it, I think maybe I should not be giving Microsoft ideas 😨
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Of the few flags that are included in the Microsoft emoji font, some represent gender identities or sexual orientation. These concepts are not universally accepted. If the strategy was not to include emojis that have the potential to cause offence in certain less civilised parts of the world, then a worse decision couldn't have been made. In some countries where Microsoft has well established presence and is eager to do even more business, the ideas and practices represented by those emojis are outright illegal and are punishable by flogging, imprisonment, or death. And yet these emojis are included in the Microsoft font. So when there is a will, there is a way?
To conclude, I think the (well-intentioned) decision not to include national flags into core Windows fonts was a big mistake. Bearing in mind the global footprint of Windows, this decision is negatively affecting a very large population every single day. The negativity comes from inconvenience, loss of productivity, and frustration of not being able to express easily what is widely accepted as a core part of one's identity.
I am not convinced at all that a few occasional butthurts prevented by the absence of national flags in the Microsoft emoji font justify the everyday worldwide hum of low-grade frustration caused by the aforementioned absence.
This Trotskyism got to end. Please make national flags great again! 😉
+1