Microsoft open-sources its cute 3D emoji, albeit without Clippy

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

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. Today, the company is going one step further, open-sourcing the vast majority of these new "Fluent" emoji designs and publishing them to Github for anyone to modify and use.

Each open-sourced emoji has three iterations: the fully 3D version, complete with texture and color gradients; a flat "color" version that retains the basic color but removes textures and gradients (these are the ones you'll see if you open Windows 11's emoji menu); and a monochromatic "high contrast" version. All files are being made available as .svg vector graphics files so that they can be resized and otherwise manipulated without any loss of quality.

There are just a couple of Microsoft's designs that it hasn't open-sourced, including the paperclip that looks like Clippy (the character is apparently copyrighted). A couple of other emoji were excluded because Microsoft's versions exclude the Windows logo. There is no generic version of the paperclip emoji listed among the emoji Microsoft has published.