Podcast Awesome

The Story Behind the Poo-Storm Icon

Font Awesome Season 2 Episode 16

💩⚡️ Hold onto your butts, folks, because this episode of Behind the Icon on Podcast Awesome is about to get ...  messy! We’re diving headfirst into the iconic history of one of Font Awesome’s quirkiest creations — the Poo-Storm icon. But if not for the creation of a stinker of a particular emoji, the poo-storm icon may never have come to fruition.

It all starts with the legendary rise of the poo emoji, a cultural masterpiece that has made its way into countless texts, memes, and conversations (whether you admit it or not). 💬

This episode is packed with everything you never knew you needed to know about emoji and icons, including a hilarious behind-the-scenes look at how Jory Raphael, Font Awesome’s own Icon Making Boss, got an icon mash-up idea. From the humble beginnings of the cloud icon to its thunderous twist into a storm of poo, Jory breaks it all down with plenty of laughs and middle-school humor. ✨💩

And yes, "icon creation", "poo emoji origin", and "Font Awesome magic" are the real stars here. Whether you're a design nerd or just here to catch a case of the goofballs, this episode is sure to entertain. 💥

Key Takeaways:
💩 The history of the poo emoji dates back to the late '90s in Japan 🇯🇵, thanks to Shigetaka Kurita, who basically invented emoji communication as we know it.

⚡️ And when boredom and eye-crossing monotony set in on a particularly long day of icon design, Jory Raphael mashed up the poo emoji into something even more fun — thus the Poo-Storm icon was born. 💡 Humor + design is the name of the game at Font Awesome!

🌍 Thanks to the Unicode Consortium, the poo emoji officially went global in 2010, becoming the symbol for all things cheeky and lighthearted in digital communication.

🎨 Font Awesome’s philosophy? Playful design with a side of absurdity — the Poo Storm icon embodies this perfectly.

🚽 Pro tip: The Poo Storm icon isn’t just for giggles — it’s been spotted in the wild at a plumbing company, proving even the weirdest icons have a purpose!

Timestamp:
0:09 - The Evolution and Cultural Impact of the Poop Emoji 💩
4:58 - The Creation of the Poo Storm Icon ⚡️
8:04 - The Perfect Use of a Fun Icon 🚽
10:20 - Clever Use of Poo Storm Icon on a Home Inspections Website 🏠
12:26 - Awesome Theme Song and Video Editing Credits 🎶

Notes:
💡 Shigetaka Kurita: https://emojipedia.org/shigetaka-kurita/ 
🔤 Unicode Consortium: https://unicode.org  
💩 The Poo-storm Icon: https://fontawesome.com/icons/poo-storm?f=classic&s=solid  
🏠 ROI Home Inspections: https://roihomeinspections.com/ 
🎨 Font Awesome: https://fontawesome.com  
🐦 Twitter: @fontawesome: https://twitter.com/fontawesome  
📸 Instagram: @font.awesome: https://www.instagram.com/font.awesome 
💬 Threads: @font.awesome https://www.threads.net/@font.awesome  
💼 LinkedIn: Font Awesome: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fontawesome  
🎶 The Podcast Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin: https://ronniemartin.org/

Stay up to date on all the Font Awesomeness!

0:00:09 - (A): As many of you may or may not know, Font Awesome's icon designer Joy Raphael is apt to create the occasional oddball icon, you know, just for the sheer joy of it. It's not always clear whether these icons will ever be used in real life projects, but we'd like to think that they will someday. And the icon to enjoy the spotlight in today's podcast is none other than the poo-storm icon. But if not for the poo emoji, the poo-storm icon may never have come to fruition, so well, take a deep dive into poo emoji lore and flush out all the details for you.

0:00:45 - (A): This is fa one the story behind the poo-storm icon long before the poo-storm emoji graced us with a perfect way to wordlessly describe that there was a craptastrophe on the horizon, the pile of poo emoji was getting plopped down into our electronic communications with abandon. And according to the emojipedia site, the pile of poo emoji can be used to represent feces and other bathroom topics, as well as stand in for their many related slang terms.

0:01:22 - (A): It also enjoys a wide range of idiosyncratic applications, such as conveying a sense of whimsy or silliness, given its fun, happy expression. And it's true, many of us have got a real soft spot for the smiling, happy looking pile of poo. The poop emoji, officially known as pile of poo, has become a ubiquitously humorous symbol in digital communication, which can be traced all the way back to Japan in the late 1990s.

0:01:53 - (A): Since then, the poo emoji has gained wide popularity through the rise of mobile tech and the introduction of emoji sets on various platforms. The poop emoji was initially created by Shigetaka Kurita. Sorry if I'm pronouncing that wrong — I probably am — a Japanese designer in 1997.

0:02:15 - (B): Don't let appearances fool you. This may look like an average office, and Shigetaka Kurita may look like an average guy, but odds are he's changed your life. Meet the man behind the emoji kampai I'm so excited for today. I use emojis every day all day, so this is a very exciting interview for me. Where did you get the ideas for emoji?

0:02:42 - (Shigataka Kurita): The ideas originated from different places. One was from manga, which often uses simple signs or designs to express emotions. It also came from pictograms and signage found on the street. At the time, the Internet was not common.

0:02:56 - (B): The first emojis are far from what we use today. Kurita designed them while working for telecom company NTT Decomo in the 1990s.

0:03:05 - (A): The emoji was part of the original 176 emojis released by Docomo in 1999.

0:03:12 - (D): They were released to Japanese cell phone users so that they could communicate their emotions over text message. They are really super tiny. These ones were like twelve by twelve pixels. Not that I know what that means, of course. They have evolved. Now you have kimoji and so many emoji options.

0:03:26 - (A): And these early emojis were rudimentary by today's standards, but laid the foundation for the diverse set of emojis we use today. The poop emoji, with its distinctive swirl and eyes, quickly became a standout and got smeared across different platforms. The Unicode Consortium, responsible for standardizing characters across platforms, officially adopted the poop emoji as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010.

0:03:53 - (A): The inclusion ensured consistent representation across various devices and operating systems, further cementing the poo emojis place in digital communication. The poop emoji transcended cultural and linguistic barriers, becoming a symbol for expressing humor, cheekiness, or lightheartedness in digital conversations. Its simplicity and universal appeal contributed to its widespread use in memes, social media, and various forms of online communication.

0:04:22 - (A): Ah, the poo emoji. A cultural touchstone. But our story takes a wild turn when our icon designer Jory Raphael, fueled by a potent blend, probably of caffeine and questionable decision making, decided to marry the pooh emoji with the unexpected, a storm cloud. But the backstory to where the inspiration for the icon came from is about as straight laced a story as they come. And when Jory was creating a weather icon set, he painstakingly made sure to stick to adhering to the NOAA parameters.

0:04:58 - (A): And as he chipped away at that icon set, he couldn't help but notice that cloud icons look a little bit like a pile of poo. And, you know, given the cultural and political landscape in recent years, a billow of poo really only seems natural, and we've got to keep our sanity somehow. So middle school humor prevailed and wallah out plop the poop storm icon. But I'll let Jory tell that story himself.

0:05:31 - (E): So, Jory, we have a set of icons that are just kind of for the fun of it, you know, why? Why not? And one of those icons is the poo-storm icon. And I've got to know, what's the story behind the making of that icon?

0:05:49 - (Jory): Pooh storm icon. All right, so the story behind making the poo-storm icon is very, very short and simple and that is that we were making a bunch of weather related icons, a bunch of icons that fit for the, what is it? The Noah, the NOAA — National Association of Oceanic ... NAO. I'm not good with acronyms, although I just thought this could be the faT.

0:06:21 - (A): The what?

0:06:22 - (Jory): The FATS.

0:06:23 - (E): The FATS.

0:06:24 - (Jory): Yeah. "The Font Awesome Talk Show". 

0:06:25 - (E): Oh, that's good. I like that.

0:06:27 - (A): Yeah, that's great.

0:06:29 - (Jory): Thanks.

0:06:31 - (E): You're welcome. We'll get the creative team to spin something, I don't know.

0:06:36 - (Jory): So we were making a bunch of weather related icons and I fit all of those guidelines and one of the icons we made was a cloud and the cloud icon, we made the cloud icon and then we made a like a thunderstorm icon. So a cloud with a little lightning bolt coming from it. And if you've ever looked at the kind of iconic representation of a cloud and I'm going to kind of draw a little thing, it's a little lumpy, little lumpy shape, billow something or other. And when you are designing icons and you're designing a bunch of icons at once, your eyes start to glaze over and blur a little bit and you just kind of start seeing, you know, shapes within shapes and it just became clear to me that a cloud looks a lot like poop to put it, you know, bluntly. I can see, you can see it and why don't we cut to the picture of that right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Roll tape, roll tape.

0:07:32 - (Jory): Cloud icon. Poop icon. And so literally I was just kind of, as a joke, I took our cloud icon with a little lightning bolt and I swapped in our poop icon, the lightning bolt and we got a giggle out of it. And I think I probably shared it to the slack channel. I'll just be like haha. And she's like why not ship it? Why not put that in fun, awesome. It's a fun icon and people use it a lot. You know, we use it internally for things, we use it for little error states and whatnot.

0:08:04 - (Jory): And recently I found a website that was using it in the absolute perfect way. And this was a like a plumbing company. It was a plumbing, yeah, it was a plumbing company, you know, sewage company and they were using it for their like was it like plumbing disasters or like, you know, you know like sewer emergency or something? It was like very perfectly, you know, on point, like you know, the literal best use of that icon, I think so.

0:08:35 - (E): Good, good use of the icon designer, whoever is behind that, kudos to you. So thanks for the appropriate use. That's fantastic.

0:08:44 - (Jory): Yep.

0:08:46 - (E): Yeah. Middle school humor is always going to prevail around here.

0:08:49 - (Jory): So you joke, but it does. And it's one of the icons that we've released that we get the most feedback on. Just like in a fun sense where people will, like, share it on social media, just like, you know, this and, you know, partly negatively, where sometimes people will say, like, oh, Font Awesome has a poo-storm icon but not XYZ on this.

0:09:11 - (E): Yeah, yeah.

0:09:12 - (Jory): You know, why did they have this and not that? And the simple answer is that we made that one, like, very quickly, kind of as a joke when we were doing other stuff to make ourselves smile and hopefully make others smile. And, and the other ones we just haven't gotten around to. You haven't gone to. Yep. But if you want them, you can commission one.

0:09:30 - (E): Yes, indeed. Yeah, we got all the information at the end of the podcast for that, if you want to commission an icon. So, jory, great job. It's a great icon. So, folks, if you have a good use, a good way to use that icon, we would love to see it. So there's not anything. There's nothing in there. Isaac, could we get some coffee, please?

0:09:55 - (Jory): Yeah. Happy.

0:10:02 - (A): All right, Lindsey, in recent months, I.

0:10:04 - (G): Noticed in a Slack channel that you mentioned that there was this local website where they had a very appropriate use of the poo-storm icon. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you discovered that?

0:10:20 - (H): Yeah, so my partner and I just bought a house, and as part of that process, we got a home inspection done. So one of the local inspectors, the one that we ultimately chose, uses a ton of font awesome icons on his website. And one of those icons was the poo-storm emoji. And perhaps the most appropriate usage of that, he has that shown with septic inspections, because if you don't have a healthy septic system, a poo storm might be likely to follow.

0:10:51 - (H): So that was just really cool to see. It's especially with local businesses, cool to see fan also being used and just such a, such a clever use of it.

0:11:02 - (G): So it is RoI Home Inspections in Pennsylvania. What area are you in specifically?

0:11:09 - (H): Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania.

0:11:11 - (G): Lehigh Valley. If you're in that area, check out ROI Home Inspections. We love to see these icons in the wild and actually have a slack channel that is specific to that, where folks will call out where and when they see font awesome icons out in the wild on websites, which is always fun and it's always especially fun when we see the really oddball one so I guess this is ultimately what we're trying to do with this series is like if if you have an appropriate use of the icon, we'd love to see it and we'll give you credit for your website so you know what to do. People use those weird icons and let's see what you got.

0:11:54 - (A): So I bet when you woke up this morning you didn't think you would have learned so much about the information behind the poop icon and all the ingenious ways that you can kind of mash up different icons to create something new and fresh. So if you have a request for a icon that we could cover in this format, let us know. And as always, podcast awesome is produced and edited by this guy right here, Matt Johnson.

0:12:26 - (A): The Font Awesome theme song was created by Ronnie Martin and the audio mastering was done by Chris Enns. The video editing for this series was done by none other than our in house Guy, Isaac Chase. Good job, Isaac.

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