Is it possible to build an emoji font using Glyphs, exporting to photofonts? What kind of support do Photoshop/Illustrator have. And could this kind of font be deployed as a webfont?
I was curious on how they made apple colored emoji fonts. If you have any insights, please let us know 
Best
Rodrigo
Colored Emoji fonts are not supported. I have briefly looked into this but have no plans to include that for now.
These fonts are only supported by apps that use the apple type system.
You can build a Photofont and use them in Photoshop or Indesign if you have a version that is supported by the Photofont plugins from FontLab.
Got it Georg, thanks, just out of curiosity, do you have any idea how are these emoji fonts designed?
Best
Rodrigo
Apple added a proprietary table to the fonts. The format is quite easy to understand, they contain some metadata and png images.
Interesting, I tried to open the .ttf in Glyphs and it showed the structure of the font and even some of the icons set as glyphs…
Oh, I didn’t even know the apple type system added support for colors. It didn’t occur to me that emoji was just a font. Are their any products that work with these types of fonts?
As I said, only apps that use the modern Cocoa text system can use this fonts.
Just wondering if you might be changing your stance on this since Windows 8.1 now supports colour / emoji fonts, and Android / iOS systems have emoji support off the bat?
Not quite. Currently, IE10 in the prerelease version of Win8.1 is the only app that supports COLR/CMAP-equipped fonts according to the Microsoft proposal. We have been working on implementing the Microsoft specs.
But Microsoft’s specs have nothing to do with the Apple-style color support. Apple’s solution uses embedded bitmaps with resolution variations. And it does not stop there. Google uses a bitmap solution, and Adobe a solution with embedded SVGs, that already works in a Firefox beta with certain hidden prefs enabled. There is no standard defined yet, and these solutions are far from finished specs so far. ISO proposals are around the corner though.
BTW, ‘emoji support’ only refers to a certain Unicode range, and does not imply color. Glyphs does that already.