Color Emoji

Design & Typography

Full-color emoji rendered using bitmap images or color vector graphics, as opposed to monochrome text-style rendering.

Color emoji are the full-color, graphical emoji we see on modern devices. They can be implemented using several technologies within font files:

- **Bitmap** (CBDT/sbix): Pre-rendered images at specific resolutions
- **Vector** (COLR, SVG): Scalable graphics that stay crisp at any size

The shift to color emoji happened gradually as platforms moved from text-based communication to richer media. Apple popularized color emoji on mobile, and now all major platforms render emoji in full color by default.

Color emoji require more data than monochrome glyphs — Apple's emoji font is over 100MB, largely due to bitmap glyph data.

Related Terms

Bitmap Emoji Bitmap Emoji
Emoji rendered as pixel-based images at fixed resolutions, stored as PNG or similar raster formats within font files. Emoji Font Emoji Font
A digital font file containing color emoji glyph designs, using technologies like COLR, CBDT, SVG, or sbix for rendering. Monochrome Emoji Monochrome Emoji
Single-color, outline-style emoji rendering that displays emoji as simple text symbols without color.

Related Tools

🔀 Platform Compare Platform Compare
Compare how emojis render across Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and more. See visual differences side by side. 🔢 Unicode Lookup Unicode Lookup
Enter a codepoint like U+1F600 and get the emoji, encoding details, UTF-8/16 bytes, and HTML entities.

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