FINGERS CROSSED FOR A CARGO BI KE EMO JI If we are lucky, at some point in 2023 we will be able to use a new emoji. That’s thanks to the hard work of David Majarich who has his heart set on a cargo bike emoji. Let’s find out why... A couple of years ago I spent a year living in Denmark with
proposal and draft design were submitted in April 2021 to
my family and we were lucky to have owned two cargo
the Unicode Consortium. That’s the organisation respon-
bikes. My wife and I enjoyed transporting our young boys
sible for universal character encoding, which provides the
and shopping in all weathers to all sorts of destinations. We
basis for digital processing, storage and interchange of
were hooked on the benefits and joys of cargo bike life. Here
text data in any language. This includes emojis - which are
we are heading into town for ice cream.
ultimately deployed and seen on every mobile phone, tablet, laptop and computer across the globe.
Emojis as a communication tool Earlier this year during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, my brother Pete and I were collaborating on some projects and started to look at emojis as a communication tool alongside our interests. Some of the most popular emojis are ‘face with tears of joy’ , ‘thumbs up’
and ‘red heart’
- note all relevant and
should be used with your local trusted and friendly bike
Waiting for approval
mechanic
At the time of writing, the submission is under review by the
. There is of course a ‘bicycle’
well as ‘person biking’
emoji as
and ‘person mountain biking’
Unicode Emoji Subcommittee against their extensive crite-
(note that for each, there are person, male and female
ria for new emojis. If successful, it will form part of version
versions, in five corresponding skin tones).
15.0, with an estimated release date at some point in 2023. Each platform (eg iOS, Google, Samsung, Twitter) will
However, there is no cargo bike emoji...
develop their own emoji version based on this draft design.
Research
The current total of emojis stands at 3,521 (as of Sept
The combination of ‘bicycle + package’
does a some-
2020, the latest release), and in recent years approximately
what OK job of representing the cargo bike, so I decided to
200 new emojis have been added annually. Each day, 92%
do some research. Readers of this magazine will already be
of the online population use emojis, with over 10 billion
aware of the growing use globally of cargo bikes for families,
being sent via social media daily. As the saying goes:
communities and business, as well as their environmental,
‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.
economic, and health benefits. I felt that this, along the high number of online search results for ‘cargo bike’ and
I’m hopeful and positive that the submission will be
of course #DecadeOfTheCargoBike, justified it’s very own
approved and that in 2023 we can all SMS, tweet or
official emoji.
whatsapp - a cargo bike emoji
Proposal to the Unicode Consortium
Me, I’m looking forward to messaging:
. ?
Next, I put together a detailed proposal and my brother did the creative design for a cargo bike emoji. Via a twitter poll we found that the ‘box/trike’ design was most popular. The
David Majarich is an Australian cargo bike fan living in North East England. Join the #CargoBikeEmoji
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THE ICBF MAGAZINE 2021
conversation with him on Twitter: @davidmajarich