A Pride flag emoji may be here sooner than you think
A new Pride flag emoji could be making its way to your mobile devices pretty soon.
BuzzFeed reports that Mark Davis of Google has submitted a formal proposal to the Unicode Consortium to have the Pride flag introduced as soon as possible.
The Unicode Consortium, of which Davis is also a co-founder, oversees the introduction of new emojis.
Davis said he was confident that the new emoji could be in place before the next emoji update.
He said a change could use existing flag shapes and rainbow characters to create the rainbow flag.
“Because existing Unicode characters are used, vendors can begin design and implementation work now and can deploy before the end of 2016, rather than waiting for Unicode v10.0 to come out in June of 2017,” the submission reads.
The first time a rainbow flag emoji was brought to the Consortium was June last year, after the US Supreme Court legaliseed same-sex marriage across all 50 states.
Last year’s proposal described it as a “powerful and potent symbol of not only current gay rights struggles, but the history of gay rights in America.”
“The flag is in the public domain, so it certainly isn’t being held up by copyright issues,” the proposal from June 2015 reads.
“And the current range of rainbow-related emoji show that the technology to jam all those colors distinctly into a very tiny space is available. Numerous national flags have been emojified. And given that the flag has recently been added to the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection, everyone is in agreement about its ongoing cultural significance. So what gives?”
Unicode has also said it is open to changes, in what proves hopeful for Davis’ cause.
