How we use Slack emojis of our people to enhance our corporate culture

Every user of Slack knows about emoji reactions. Those nifty, often cute little pictures built into the team collaboration tool used to express various sentiments at the bottom of a post. When used as a reaction to a post, they can give the OP insight into how readers feel.

You may be aware that Slack lets you add your own custom emojis. At ChefHero for example, we have our company logo, our mascot, and some of our suppliers’ logos to reference.

Our team loves using emojis as a response to Slack posts, and it’s fun to watch how they’re used on Slack and a few months ago we started adding photos of our staff as custom emojis. We’d add a few people at a time, mostly as the need arose (somebody would call out a team member for doing a great job on something and we added the employee emoji as a fun ‘trophy’ of sorts to the post.)

Here’s an example:

As you can see in the post above, Hiba posted a note thanking and congratulating Spencer (a member of our CS team) for his effort helping to spread the word about a new ChefHero marketing asset. Hiba used the :spencer: emoji in the body of her post and you can see people also ‘responded’ using other team member emojis too (I shortened the chart for brevity).

We thought having individual team emojis would be kinda cool, but we never anticipated how much the entire org would love and embrace their usage. As of last week, every employee at ChefHero now has their own emoji and they play a strong supporting role as we continue to build a culture of recognition and thankfulness at ChefHero.

What’s next?

With all the fun we’re having, we’ll probably make two versions of emojis for each team member: a normal, everyday version and a fun version. Like these:

7 fast and easy steps to awesome Slack emojis of people.

I know what you’re thinking: “Those images must take forever to do!” Each of these photos, even the more complicated ones with wavy hair takes less than 5 minutes to edit. Here’s why: you can be sloppy. An emoji is only 128 pixels. If you have a 3000px photo you’re cropping, trust me, when you shrink it down to the size of an emoji, it hides a lot of mistakes.

Before you begin: I recommend starting with a photo of a team member facing the camera. It’s helpful if they’re evenly lit (shadows will be more pronounced when the emoji is shrunk down on upload.)

1. Open the photo in your favourite image editing app. I use Photoshop, but free web tools like PIXLR work great too (pixlr.com).
2. Select the crop tool and choose “fixed ratio” for the style setting. Choose 1 for width and height (this will keep your crop square.)
3. Crop the face so the top of your emoji’s head almost touches the top of the crop and leave a bit more space under the chin. (I personally think emojis look good with a bit of neck/shoulders.) Note: Once cropped, it will be less distracting as you work to remove the background detail.
4. Select the subject by selecting the polygonal lasso tool and clicking around the outline of the subject. Tip: Since the photo is going to be shrunk to 128 pixels, don’t worry too much about being precise here… especially around subjects with wavy/wispy hair. Your detail work won’t be appreciated and you’ll just waste time.
5. Cut out the background by choosing select inverse. This will change the selection from your subject to the background. Hit the delete key to remove the background. Now you should have your subject properly frames in a square photo, with the background removed.
6. Export the emoji by choosing Export -> Quick export as PNG and save your file.
7. Upload your custom emoji by logging in to your slack.com instance using a web browser. Note: you can’t upload emojis from the app. This URL will take you to the custom emoji page: https://<your-team-name>.slack.com/customize/emoji. Click Upload -> select your emoji and then choose a name (we just use first name, sometimes last initial).

That’s it! You can test your new emoji by typing the new alias name surrounded by colons like this: :<aliasname>:

Tips when creating Slack emojis.

There are a few tips to consider when creating slack emojis:

• Don’t use JPEG files as they don’t support transparency. PNG files are best because you can use a transparency layer and “cut out” your team from their background
• Emojis are quite small at 128 pixels square. At this size, small details are lost.
• When shrinking down people, it might be helpful to increase the brightness of the image prior to saving. This will help your emoji stand-out.
• People have asked me why transparency is important instead of just a white background. My answer: it doesn’t make a big difference. Transparency is a nice touch, but the key is removing a busy background that may be distracting in a tiny 128-pixel emoji.