Layer Tennis is a design competition run by Coudal Partners, spartan proprietors (along with Draplin Design Co.) of Field Notes, and presented by Adobe Creative Cloud. I don’t know how long it has been running and I don’t full well understand the rules or the state of play.

What I do understand is this lovely intro to today’s match from John Gruber, today’s commentator:

Words, carefully chosen, can be precise in meaning. With emoji you lose that precision, but in exchange you gain a remarkable expressiveness for feeling. An emoji is seldom worth a thousand words, but depending on the moment, it can come close. In the way that email turned everyone into a writer, emoji turn everyone into a visual communicator. That’s something.

As a fan of Coudal (by way of my favorite tiny notebooks) I’ve seen Layer Tennis pop up along my feeds for the past few weeks. I never got it. I still don’t. But I’m getting closer.

I’ll watch today’s match, then, and see where things go.