“No one should ever feel unrepresented or unseen. Love is universal, and it’s time for interracial couples to be represented in our universal language.”
That’s a statement from Tinder. It’s talking about emoji. Because while it seems as though there’s an emoji for everything these days – and everyone…one group is being left out.
There are no emoji for interracial couples. Unicode, the company behind Emoji, offers emoji for people of many races and emoji for same-sex couples. But not for interracial couples.
OK, emoji are tiny little symbols – but they’re also a universal digital language that represents how the world is.
Marcel Sydney and Tinder think that interracial couples should be represented. So the partners created a global campaign that leads people to a petition to get it done.
Why Tinder? Because interracial marriages are resulting from the online dating world. They’re increasing, and according to a recent Cornell University study, the popularity of dating apps like Tinder, is responsible for that. Tinder wants its audience to be represented.
The Marcel & Tinder project, called #representlove, will ask Unicode to give mobile phones the option to customise the skin tone of the couple with the heart emoji.
The campaign is led by an online film, directed by Tim Kindler through Heckler, which highlights the fact that while there are thousands of emoji for almost everything and everyone, there are none that represent interracial couples.
The campaign also invites people to #representlove by uploading an image of themselves for a chance to be turned into their very own emoji. A team of designers will then create emoji based on over 250 design combinations to match the couples. For the chance to receive their own couple emoji, couples simply upload a picture on Twitter or Instagram with #representlove. Hundreds of these customised emoji have already been created.
#representlove has already drawn in celebrities in interracial relationships, such as Nicole Richie, wife of Joel Madden; and Alexis Ohanian, husband of Serena Williams and founder of Reddit.
Wesley Hawes, creative lead at Marcel Sydney, commented, “It’s exciting to work on a global campaign with such a positive message. And for a cool, global brand that people love. It’s an ambitious social project, but our army of designers from LA, Sydney, Germany and France, who are answering couples’ posts live, have been up to the task.”
The campaign has generated a lot of online abuse and racist commentary. So much so, a video response was created featuring all the couples who have taken part in the project, to personally answer trolls.
if you’re going to be an ignorant racist asshole at least learn how to spell it properly
— Jamie (@jamietimm13) February 28, 2018
The campaign launched on February 27 in the US, and followed the time zones through to Australia. It has already been picked up by Vice, Wired, Fast Company, Vogue, High Snobiety, Mashable, The Independent, Hypebeast, and Newsweek, to name a few.
People can sign the Interracial Couples Emoji petition on change.org. The original signature goal was 1000. The petition stands at 9058 and counting.
The campaign is part of Tinder’s core mission to create a more diverse and inclusive platform.
Credits:
Agency: Marcel Sydney
Production Company: Heckler
Director: Tim Kindler
Executive Producer: Will Alexander
Head of VFX: Jamie Watson
Live Action Producer: Charu Menon
Post Producer: Amy Jarman
Editor: Andrew Holmes
Colourist: Clement Bouchet
Illustrator: Fred Venet
Animators: Shaun Leong-Williams & Adrien Girault
Compositors: Maxence Peillon & Bertrand Polivka
Music Supervisor: Anton @ Trailer Media
