A quick visit to Emojipedia will show you different versions of the same emoji. Some are open source but others are locked down enough to prevent general use. Fortunately, projects like OpenMoji exist, offering more than 4,000 emojis under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, compatible with version 14 of the Unicode standard.
Google's Noto Emoji library uses the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and Apache License 2.0, combined with certain elements that belong to the public domain (e.g., flags). That gives flexibility to both end users and developers, but if Noto Emoji designs aren't appropriate for some reason, the good news is that we have other alternatives at hand. One of the most interesting is OpenMoji, which offers 4,000 emojis under Unicode 14.0 using different formats.
OpenMoji: More than 4,000 free and open-source emojis
The available downloads on OpenMoji are ten: SVG in black and color, PNG in black and color at 72x72, PNG in black and color at 618x618, TTF files in black and color (both in beta), the app of OpenMoji for iOS, and the source code. When downloading the PNG color 618x618 option, we discover a total of 4,083 emojis, all identified with their original code.
What does that mean? That locating a specific emoji without the help of portals like Emojipedia or OpenMoji's own internal system can become very tedious. All we have to do is search for the desired emoji with a general description, and then go to the Technical Information section, where the codepoint appears. Once we have the codepoint, the rest is a matter of finding its equivalent in the list.
The OpenMoji license is CC BY-SA 4.0, so the only thing it requires is attribution. As for the quality of the emojis, I suppose each user will have to draw their own conclusions, but the possibility of accessing SVG or PNG versions with transparent backgrounds cannot be taken lightly. Link below!
Official website and downloads: Click here
