Microsoft’s New Emojis Let You Customize and Create Your Family

Microsoft has redesigned it’s emojis in such a way to be inclusive of all families — and it’s about time.

Last month with the Windows 10 update, they redesigned the emojis “from the bottom-up with universality at its heart.” Rather than just the standard yellow person emoji, there are now five skin tones to choose from. Better yet, the people emojis can be combined in endless combinations to reflect your family.

“So if you’re a single mother with three kids, you’ll be able to create that image. If your husband is dark-toned and you’re light-toned and your two kids are a blend of both, you can apply all of those modifiers to create your own personal family emoji, one that’s sincerely representative,” explains Microsoft.

The same could be said for same-sex couples with children, or even transracial adopted families!

“It was very important to us that we give the designers the freedom to design within the style no matter how complex the designs were,” said Microsoft Graphic Designer Mike LaJoie. He added, “We developed scripts that allow us to be very agile with the production. The family combinations were particularly challenging from a technical point of view, but I’m really excited that we’re able to make that feature available.”

Unfortunately, these new emojis are only available on Windows 10 ecosystem, but we hope that the Unicode Consortium follows suit and makes this a universal standard for all emojis — because representation matters.