Related to the graphic, but unrelated to the unicode angle: I have a colleague who was in communications for her organization (not even a tech company). She told me about the time they used a stock photo of a racially-ambiguous (not white, not black, but could be interpreted as mixed race, asian, hispanic, middle-eastern, etc) hand checking a box for a "Make sure you vote!" campaign last year, and they got a lot of flak for not explicitly making the hand black--literally some people were saying they felt that the message was explicitly excluding them or that they couldn't relate to it because the skin tone didn't match theirs. They made sure the hand was a female hand because they had previously gotten flak for that.
I think about that a lot when I look at corporate messaging like this. These days a lot of effort is put into making sure the content doesn't offend people who hold strongly to beliefs about race and gender--something that I might not be so aware of if I hadn't had her inside perspective. I wonder what kind of conversations must be had inside Apple's communications team about the "identities" of these avatars.
I'm sure some people will downvote this into oblivion (and fair enough--race and gender have been breathlessly promoted for the last 5+ years and some people are understandably fatigued of the topic), but I think trends about race and gender are interesting and maybe others will appreciate this anecdote.
I think about that a lot when I look at corporate messaging like this. These days a lot of effort is put into making sure the content doesn't offend people who hold strongly to beliefs about race and gender--something that I might not be so aware of if I hadn't had her inside perspective. I wonder what kind of conversations must be had inside Apple's communications team about the "identities" of these avatars.
I'm sure some people will downvote this into oblivion (and fair enough--race and gender have been breathlessly promoted for the last 5+ years and some people are understandably fatigued of the topic), but I think trends about race and gender are interesting and maybe others will appreciate this anecdote.