4 Ways to Make Discord Emojis For Free
I have used Discord for a couple of years now. I am by no means an expert on Discord or graphic design, and how I design my emojis is probably not considered “best practice”. I was added to a Discord server earlier this week and was given Manage Emoji permissions. I got a little carried away and had a ton of fun. If you want to learn how to make your own funny emojis for your Discord server for free this guide is for you.
Note: If you aren’t feeling creative and want to add some pre-existing emojis, check out this website and read the Getting Started/Uploading section.
Getting Started/Uploading
To start, you’ll need Discord. If you didn’t already have it, why would you be reading this? I’ll cover how to make and upload emojis on an iPhone later, but I’ll first cover how to get the job done on a computer.
You’ll need to create or already be in a Discord server.
After that, click on the dropdown carat next to the server name, and click “Server Settings”. If you are in a server and you don’t see that option, ask the host to give you Manage Emoji permissions.
Now that you’re in the Server Settings, you can click on “Emoji” in the sidebar and you’ll see an “Upload Emoji” button. Click that, and select your image! You’ll see it appear. Change the alias to whatever you’d like. Discord allows you to quickly use emojis by typing a colon, followed by the alias, followed by a colon.
I love using freeware. Actually, I think I like not paying for things more than using free software. If it gets the job done, and you don’t have to pay for it, why not use it? (Yes, I am poor, thank you for asking.)
I use GIMP for raster images (like Adobe Photoshop) and Inkscape for vector images (think Adobe Illustrator). I am more well-versed in Inkscape than GIMP, but for the sake of this guide, I’ll show you how to make a simple Discord server emoji in both.
1. GIMP
I am using GIMP 2.10.24. You can download it here. I found myself using the Fuzzy Select Tool more than anything else. I’ll cover how to use that and how to make sure your background is transparent. I’ll also cover how to feather the edges of an image.
Let’s convert this image of a monkey I found on Google into a Discord emoji using GIMP. So zen-like.
To start, open up GIMP and copy and paste the image, or save the image to your computer and import it using File > Open.
We need to make sure our monkey friend has a transparent background, so we’ll add an alpha channel. Click Layer in the menu bar, hover over Transparency and then click Add Alpha Channel.
Next, select the Fuzzy Select Tool and make sure the mode is set to “Add to current selection”.
Start clicking the background! You’ll see that the Fuzzy Select Tool selects chunks of the green background. Pro tip: when using the Fuzzy Select Tool, if you click and drag down or up you can select more or less of the image. Once you have all of the background selected, press the Delete key to get rid of it. You should see a grey checkerboard behind our monkey. You can press Ctrl + Shift + A to deselect everything you’ve selected.
You’ll see that the edges of our monkey have a green hue because of the background. Let’s fade the edges to remove the green hue.
Using the Fuzzy Select Tool, click the monkey and drag the mouse down until all of the monkey is selected.
Next, right-click and hover over Selection. Click Shrink. I chose to shrink by 3 pixels, but play around with it and find what you think works best.
“The Shrink command reduces the size of the selected area by moving each point on the edge of the selection a certain distance further away from the nearest edge of the image (toward the center of the selection).”
After that, right-click and hover over Selection again. Click Feather. I selected 3 pixels for this as well.
“The Feather command feathers the edges of the selection. This creates a smooth transition between the selection and its surroundings.”
Finally, right-click again, hover over Selection and click Invert. Now hit the Delete key! Now our monkey’s edges are all smooth and while you can see a wee bit of green, you won’t be able to notice when the monkey is emoji-sized.
We will need to scale our monkey down to subceed Discord’s 256 KB limit for emoji images. Right-click the Transform tool and select Scale, or hit Shift + S. I scaled my monkey down to about 500 pixels wide. From there, click Scale or hit the Enter key. Now go up to the menu bar, click Image, and hover down, and click Crop to Content.
Now to export. Click File in the menu bar and click Export As. Make sure to export as a PNG file! To do so, type the name of your file (I chose “monkey_emoji”) and end it with “.png”. My full filename is monkey_emoji.png. Exporting as a PNG ensures that the background stays transparent.
Once the image is exported, upload it to your Discord server. I made the alias, “zen”.
2. Inkscape
Let’s make a simple text-based emoji in Inkscape. This could probably be done in GIMP as well, but I have not yet used text in GIMP. We’ll make an emoji that says “Cool!” because you and all of your Discord buddies are cool. I’m using Inkscape 1.1 (1.1 finally has built-in dark themes!!!). Download Inkscape here.
To start, open Inkscape. In Quick Setup I use the Dark Checkerboard canvas and Greyscale appearance. Hit Time to Draw and then New Document. Once you have Inkscape open, you’ll see the page border. This doesn’t really affect the process at all, but I like to remove it. You can do so by going to File > Document Properties, then unchecking “Show page border”.
To add text, click the tool with the capital A, or press T. I used a font I found on Google Fonts called “Luckiest Guy”. Here’s the link if you’d like to use it too. You can change the font in the top left corner of Inkscape when you have the text tool selected. Note: if you download and install the font with Inkscape open, you’ll have to close and reopen Inkscape for the font to be available.
Click the canvas and type “COOL!”.
Next, deselect by pressing Escape, then press S to use the Select tool. Make the fill white by clicking the white box in the color selection bar near the bottom of the screen.
Click the text and resize it to your liking. You can hold down Ctrl to lock the ratio as your scale it. To increase the readability of the text when it’s emoji-sized, you can increase the spacing between each letter. Double click the text and increase the number next to the two A’s up top.
Next, duplicate the text by right-clicking and selecting Duplicate or by pressing Ctrl + D. Recolor the top text to your liking and move it slightly off to create a shadow (light?) effect. You can press the arrow keys with an object selected to move it incrementally. I used cyan for the top layer and white underneath.
Now to export our emoji. Select both layers of text using the Select tool or by pressing Ctrl + A with the Select tool selected. Go to File > Export As. Click the Selection tab to export only what you have selected.
Now upload the emoji to Discord. I made the alias “cool2” because an emoji with the alias “cool” already exists. I had no clue. Now you’ve successfully made a cool text-based emoji!
3. On the Web
I made a Dwight Schrute emoji using an online photo editor called Pixlr. It’s similar to GIMP and it’s a little easier to use. It’s not as robust, however, so we’ll have to use the tools a little differently.
Let’s get started. There are a couple of ways to upload pictures into Pixlr. You can Create New and copy/paste an image, upload an image from your computer, or you can use the photo’s URL. I chose to use the URL method. I chose this image from Google Images. It’s listed as a sticker you can buy on Amazon.
Fun fact: I have that exact picture on my water bottle thanks to my wife. I went out into public with my hair parted down the middle once — water bottle in hand — and someone said, “Not only do you look like a legend, but you embrace it too.” (Rainn Wilson, if you’re reading this, I love you.)
Once you have the image uploaded, select Cutout on the sidebar and use the Magic Cutout tool to get rid of the background like we did for the monkey using GIMP. You’ll click the background, the inner circles, and all of the letters. If you miss something, that’s okay — we’ll be using an eraser tool next.
Next, select the Draw tool on the sidebar and use the Eraser to get rid of all the junk we don’t want. You can resize the eraser if you need to.
You can take it a step further to make it pixel perfect if you’d like to. We can’t feather edges like we did in GIMP. I erased the yellowish lines surrounding Dwight’s head pixel by pixel. It takes a little bit of time but I’m a perfectionist when I want to be. Feel free to do the same or move on!
Now to crop the image. Select Crop on the sidebar, then click Select aspect. 1:1 (a square) will be selected by default. Resize to fit Dwight’s head snugly, then click Apply in the bottom left area of the screen.
Let’s export! Hit Save near the bottom right area of the screen. Next, rename the image and resize it to make sure the file size is under 256 KB to make Discord happy. I love that Pixlr lists the file size.
Finally, hit Download and upload Mr. Schrute to Discord! Super easy.
4. On Your Phone
You can use pictures on your phone to make emojis for Discord. I found that on iPhone, Discord won’t upload images with a transparent background correctly. It always adds a white background in place of transparency. It probably has something to do with file conversion on their end, but oh well!
Open Discord on your phone and go into your server settings.
Now tap on Emoji, then Upload Emoji. Next, select an image. I selected a picture I took in a mask. Crop the photo to your liking, and tap Choose.
Now you can make the alias whatever you’d like!
This is a super simple method to add emojis to Discord, but unfortunately, there’s no way to upload emojis with a transparent background using the mobile app at this point in time. However, I read that you may be able to log in to Discord on a mobile browser, but I have not tested that myself.
I hope you found this guide helpful, and I hope you’ll make a number of funny emojis for you and your friends.
Happy creating!