“Emoji have reached critical mass,” says Zoë Salditch, communications director at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center. And she’s right, emoji are everywhere: In Katy Perry’s music ...

As part of its Windows 11 design push, Microsoft also published fun redesigns for all of its emoji characters that added more character and texture than the older Windows 8- and 10-era versions.

Such intimate fandom should make designing emoji for something so iconic as Star Wars easy, right? Quite the contrary. It's a challenge that places the designer at the mercy of rabid fans—not to ...