The plan, in part, is to have a discussion.

As we began to examine the Emoticons category we quickly learned that we had a bit of a mess to clean up, but fortunately it's a very cute mess and very fun to think about.

As a category, Chat Friendly Emotes isn't going to cut it anymore. There are Emotes in it that come from various inspirations, meanwhile,  a very clear culture that has formed around Emotes that deviantART specifically has always supported. The ones that are 15 x 15 pixels in size doing all wonders of things. Providing a category for this specific, and very popular style is a must and this would split those  Emotes from intermingling with other sized, shaped and styled Emotes.

The thought was to make this style reside within the new category, "Chat Friendly PLZ" but let's discuss that! Changing a category name takes us a matter of seconds to do, so we would love your input on the final name for the category - home to the adorable Emotes we all love!

A second type and style has taken off at deviantART over the past number of years, which is about Emotes but also about all manner of easy referencing within the deviantART community as a media language of its own. These are referred to as PLZ accounts.




For reference, people are creating deviantART accounts solely for the purpose of using the 50x50 user icon space, to take advantage of the " iconNAME " media code for use within any text box on deviantART.


This is happening at a rate of 250 PLZ accounts per day! An incredible amount of work surrounding this can be simplified, so that PLZ artists can focus on making fun PLZ media codes instead of making dummy accounts.

We want support this by enabling a registry for media codes of a few types. Our cute culture of 15x15 pixel Emotes, allowing those to be up to 25x50 in size but requiring the correct style and a transparent background to ensure "Chat Friendliness." the PLZ culture permitting codes between 25x50 and 50x50. And the last being yet another emerged culture of Emotes that are "full thumb" in size, or 150x150, which were spawned by the thumb size limitation of deviantART thumbnails of 150x150 so that they  could display in full within our browse environments.

On top of this we need to separate out Static Emotes from Animated Emotes.

Ultimately pulling from this registry would allow us to limit use of these media codes by type, with our chat friendly Emotes being permitted to work in all areas, and maybe "small 50x50's" too, and the large ones working in places like the forums where they are most welcome.

Ideally this conversation should extend to how cool such a registry is, and how much other sites would love to use it. And I think while there is an affinity towards only having these codes on deviantART, perhaps this is an excellent art project to provide the open web with, for free, for use with all manner of networks out there, who as we all know are suffering with what could be considered, "rather crappy Emotes by comparison" -  if we do say so ourselves.

This is the thought behind codeplz.com, a solution to the complexity of design initially presented by the "Emoticon Dictionary Project" that has been delayed so many times mostly because it was hard to conceptualize how to do it well, while taking in to consideration all of the above sub cultures and also providing architecture to expand with more types as new styles arise in the future.

We are not releasing any of this for use without a lot more conversation about it, nor without your explicit permission, so please,  do not worry about that.

So, with all that said, what are your thoughts?


$Moonbeam13