Microsoft has announced that it has made nearly all its 3D emojis available for customization, though mercifully Clippy isn't included. Microsoft says the move is "aligned with our own design philosophy of designing in the open."

Microsoft updated its 3D emojis last year, alongside things like live reactions in Teams and a colorful set of new stickers, backgrounds, themes, and emoji to use throughout the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

The newly available emojis are available on GitHub and Figma and can be fully customized as vector files. The collection is made up 1,538 emojis under the MIT open-source license. The emojis that have made the list are all made available in SVG, PNG, and JPG file to enable true versatility, with a vector, flat, and monochrome version for scale and flexibility.

Quite what developers will use customized emojis for other than their own personal apps and amusement isn't that clear - the Unicode Consortium controls what emojis make it onto the official list, and you're not going to be able to make use of any customized icons in Windows.

However, Microsoft does seem to be moving towards offering ways to customize your environments. Back in May Microsoft announced Express Design, a Power Apps feature that lets developers transform a visual design into an app. Express Design is still in beta, but can be used to turn existing designs including paper forms, whiteboard sketches, or Figma files directly into a working app.

Discussing the emojis and Express Design, John Friedman, Head of Microsoft Office design, said developers should "stay tuned for additional creator experiences rolling out this Fall".

Alongside keeping Clippy under wraps, other emojis including country flags, video game, and technologist emoji aren't available. Explaining this, Friedman said:

"I’d personally love to but due to (legal speak, legal speak, legal speak), we can’t open-source trademarks."  

However, given the number of bad-taste Clippy memes that have appeared over the years, it's probably a good thing the wider developer world isn't encouraged to do their worst with Clippy and the dark places you can go with 'it looks like you want to..." .

More Information

Fluent UI Emojis On GitHub

Fluent Emojs On Figma

Express Design

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