Jennifer Daniel posits that Emoji are a font. And that it’s time they started behaving more like one.

In 1999 — back when Snake 🐍 was the best thing about your phone 📱— there were three phone carriers in Japan 🗾. On these phones were tiny, beautiful pictures called emoji (meaning “picture” and “character”  in Japanese 🥰). These 176 images were very simple — think 8-bit tech — and as a result were exquisitely abstract and tremendously useful when texting ✨ Twenty years later 👶🕛🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔🕕🕖🕗🕘🕙🕚🧓, emoji are a global phenomenon 🌎.

Now, our phones have fancy retina screens and somewhere along the way an important part of what made emoji so handy was left by the wayside: their simplicity. That’s why we’ve created a new emoji font: a monochrome Noto Emoji (a black and white companion to Noto Emoji Color).

Noto Emoji works like any other font you might use: You can change any character’s color, size and weight. Download it and give it a whirl.

We also want to make sure emoji keep up with platform technology. We’ve got dark mode … we’ve got light mode … and now you can change the color of your emoji font so it can operate with the same dynamism as your operating system. Noto Emoji is also a variable font — opt for a “light” grade if it appears small 💪 or “bold” if you want them to have some weight. 💪

You can read more in the article here. And if you think emojis should be transferred into just another font, post in the comments below.