It’s a guy in a suit, levitating. Fucking why? Ngl I use it all the time but only because of the sheer mystery of, why does he exist, what is his purpose? Who is he? What does he mean? Illuminati?
TIA 🙂
It’s a guy in a suit, levitating. Fucking why? Ngl I use it all the time but only because of the sheer mystery of, why does he exist, what is his purpose? Who is he? What does he mean? Illuminati?
TIA 🙂
Comments
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There’s a Wikipedia article on it.
> Man in Business Suit Levitating was initially a part of the 1997 font Webdings, selected by the team developing Internet Explorer 4 as one of the font’s 230 icons. The designer of the Man in Business Suit Levitating icon for Webdings was Vincent Connare, who also created Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS. According to Connare, the original Man in Business Suit Levitating icon was based on the keyword “jump” and modeled after the logo of 2 Tone Records, which he saw on the cover of an LP record he had by The Specials, a ska group that was one of his favorite bands. The 2 Tone Records logo (named Walt Jabsco) was in turn based on the appearance of reggae musician Peter Tosh in a 1964 photo of Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Emoji were not planned out as a master thing right from the start. There wasn’t really a “point” to it beyond just what was thought to be symbols people would want to send.
Computers think in terms of binary and numbers. So we have some sort of mapping between theses and the characters that we recognise.
Originally there were lots of competing standards for this. And one Japanese company had the idea of including other little symbols rather than just plain old letters in theirs.
But this caused lots of problems when sending messages between different systems.
In the 1990s a standard called “unicode” was made. And one of the goals of unicode was that every existing symbol that could possibly be written on a computer would be included in the new standard. That way anything that had ever been written on a computer could be migrated over without data loss.
And those original symbols from any and all other old systems got included as well as a result. They were largely just added by a small teams looking at what they thought the local market would want without big picture oversight. That included 🕴️ which is from the logo of an old record label (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Tone_Records) and was included in an old version of Webdings.
In this day and age there is more consideration and whole committees that deal with what get included and what don’t. But those original ones are still there and are not going anywhere. Like when the standard was first made Unicode include old characters to ensure that anything written with previous versions of the standard will continue to display accurately on other computers using more modern versions.
Edit: Obligatory Tom Scott YouTube video: https://youtu.be/tITwM5GDIAI
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