Tag: Emoticons

If you thought that emoticons were the same in all languages, you’d be dead wrong. Just check out the differences between English emoticons and their Japanese equivalents courtesy of Wired’s handy English-to-Japanese emoticon cheat sheet. I guess this makes sense, since in sign language, American English is pretty different from British English.

Designed by Ginguni for Japanese brand gung, this handmade rubber stamp will let you mass-produce endearing (at first, and then they’re just freaking annoying) emoticons. We’re not talking about simple smileys and sad faces here – this rubber stamp is for hardcore emoticon enthusiasts.

Chatman is a new sort of toy that plugs into your computer, helping to make your instant messaging more interesting for everyone, especially kids. Chatman is kind of an emoticon itself, but it’s able to display different faces based on your IM discussions.

Cheesy emoticons — they’re not just for your IM client anymore. Thanks to ClixWear, you can plaster semi-colon smileys and less-than-threes on your chest (and regions beyond). Emoticons are designed to help add context and tone to text-based conversations (because it’s important to distinguish between a joke and a dig), but all the winking on these shirts begs the question of whether the pithy little labels are meant seriously or sarcastically.