Style combination · Pairs well

Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay × Emoji Pictographic Language

Kaomoji and emoji already ride inside danmaku lines; use them as small pictographs in the stream rather than as large isolated icons.

From the research on Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay

Mix them and make something Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay Emoji Pictographic Language

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Emoji Pictographic Language, their arrangement from Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay, the finish from Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay Emoji Pictographic Language

Type from Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay: Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from Emoji Pictographic Language: Full polychrome
Flat fields
Form from Emoji Pictographic Language: Pictogram
Stylised figuration
Composition from Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay: Layered information
Repetition & rhythm
Surface from Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay: Hard offset shadow
Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay

Hello

Zen Kaku Gothic New, standing in for Arial for Latin letters and digits, then MS PGothic (ＭＳＰゴシック) for Japanese, at weight 600: the Windows default of Niconico's comment rendering (Hiragino Kaku Gothic ProN W6 on macOS); in the Flash player certain characters switched the Japanese text around them to Gulim or SimSun, a font change (フォント変化) (all as reproduced by the open-source niconicomments renderer, which cites a comment-art wiki for the font change)

Text · Emoji Pictographic Language

Pictographs typed as characters and set inline in running text. Born on Japanese mobile phones (J-Phone's 90 monochrome signs of 1997, the 176 single-colour signs that Shigetaka Kurita led for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode in 1999, on 12 x 12 pixel grids) and encoded in Unicode in 2009-2010, each emoji is one face, hand, object, food or flag centred on a square em with no ground. Unicode fixes the code point and name; each vendor draws its own full-colour version, flat, glossy or rendered in 3D, so one sign circulates in many visual dialects.

Shippori Mincho; Emoji Pictographic Language used The 12 x 12 dot external-character (gaiji) glyphs in which Japanese carriers first delivered emoji, typed into mobile mail and i-mode pages beside kana and kanji and Apple Color Emoji (2008)

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Emoji Pictographic Language, with a counter-accent from Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay Emoji Pictographic Language

#ffcc4d ground · 36%
#664500 ink · 14%
#f4a223 accent · 18%
#ff0000 accent · 14%
#dd2e44 accent · 10%
#ffff00 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffcc4d;
  --ink: #664500;
  --accent-1: #f4a223;
  --accent-2: #ff0000;
  --accent-3: #dd2e44;
  --accent-4: #ffff00;
  --font-display: "Zen Kaku Gothic New", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Shippori Mincho", serif;
}

Use it with care

Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay: Danmaku is moving text that starts on its own, runs longer than five seconds and sits on top of other content, so any design that uses it needs a way to pause, hide or thin it (WCAG 2.2.2, which is why platforms build an off switch) and must keep it clear of faces and captions. Real comments are other people's words over footage someone else owns: write your own lines rather than lifting screenshots, and do not fake an audience's enthusiasm in advertising. A live comment layer can also be used to pile abuse on people, and in mainland China the China Netcasting Services Association's rules for short-video platforms of 9 January 2019 require danmaku to be reviewed before it is shown, so moderate any live use.

Emoji Pictographic Language: Reuse emoji artwork only from the open sets and on their terms (Twemoji graphics CC BY 4.0 with attribution, OpenMoji CC BY-SA 4.0, Noto fonts SIL OFL 1.1, Fluent Emoji MIT); the platform sets are their vendors' own artwork, so do not lift their drawings into a logo or print. Remember too that a code point reaches each reader in that reader's vendor drawing, which may differ in detail, colour or even meaning from the one you chose.

The two styles

2006–present · East Asia Danmaku Bullet-Comment Overlay The bullet-comment layer of Japanese and Chinese video sites, begun on Niconico in December 2006 and taken up by AcFun and Bilibili in 2008–2009. Viewers' one-line comments fly across the playing video from right to left, or sit centred at the top or bottom, each timed to the moment it answers. By default every line is the same white, black-outlined sans at one size; commands add saturated RGB colours and sizes, and viewers set opacity and speed. At climaxes identical lines pile into a 'bullet curtain' over the picture: anonymous crowd writing laid over someone else's image.

A smiling cartoon Earth is hugged by two yellow hands, surrounded by red hearts and short yellow rays on a white background. The word “Together” appears below in thick, rounded brown lettering.

1997–present · East Asia, Global / networked Emoji Pictographic Language Pictographs typed as characters and set inline in running text. Born on Japanese mobile phones (J-Phone's 90 monochrome signs of 1997, the 176 single-colour signs that Shigetaka Kurita led for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode in 1999, on 12 x 12 pixel grids) and encoded in Unicode in 2009-2010, each emoji is one face, hand, object, food or flag centred on a square em with no ground. Unicode fixes the code point and name; each vendor draws its own full-colour version, flat, glossy or rendered in 3D, so one sign circulates in many visual dialects.