Pot Cover! Making Cultural Emojis Loud and Proud.
Sorry, we can’t hear you over this gif.
Jamaicans LOVE athletics. If a Jamaican is in the Olympic sprint finals, traffic literally grinds to a halt while crowds of excited people fill the streets to watch the race together on giant outdoor screens. And when they celebrate a win, you’re sure to hear the ‘peng-eleng-eleng!’ of clanging dutch pot covers.
But due to Covid restrictions this year, fans were forced to watch the events from home and live tweet their cheers instead. They tried adding pot cover emojis, but couldn’t find a satisfactory emoji or gif that brought the same energy. Cheers were muted. Vibes were lost.
We animated a pot cover Whatsapp emoji we’d done before, and shared it along with a few other gifs and stickers. In just 3 weeks, they’d been viewed over 140,000 times, the Prime Minister tweeted the pot cova, and they’ve shown up in chats on other platforms like Instagram, Whatsapp and Discord. Here’s how it’s going, how it started, and how you can support more projects like these.
How it’s going
“Brown dog, we are officially first world.”
According Giphy data, the most viewed gifs and stickers by far were initially the pot covers, with a spike on the day of the incredible 4x100M relay gold won by Jamaica’s women. Since then, ‘dancehall’ has been a more popular search term and dancing gifs have caught up to take 2nd and 3rd place.
What’s also notable is that the pot cover sticker, accessible on IG stories for e.g., leads the gif in views.
The stickers are my favourites because in Instagram stories you can add them to your post to create a composition of your own.
Though Giphy has counted over 140,000 total views, unfortunately we don’t have figures for gifs viewed via Tenor, as that platform doesn’t share viewing or usage stats. This is kinda disappointing. We’re probably missing as much as 40% of the data from platforms like Twitter and Whatsapp which both pull gifs from Tenor’s library.
One comment really stood out to me though; “Brown dog, we are officially first world.” I felt that. It reminded me of 2 things.
Firstly, the importance of underrepresented symbols in an online world. Emojis and gifs are snapshots of how we feel. But Twitter’s visual library didn’t include how Jamaicans feel when celebrating.
The internet shapes the way we express ourselves. But if we don’t teach it our own language, we’ll end up expressing ourselves as someone else. Adding gifs that ‘get’ people’s culture helps them express themselves more sincerely no matter where they are.
It also reinforced for me that inclusion by default feels good. When familiar feelings are baked into the products we use, we experience a rush of excitement. We feel like they’re designed with us in mind.
How we got here
So the short story is I was tagged in a few ‘we need a pot cover’ tweets by folks who knew that we’d done Whatsapp stickers before. Of course we’re passionate about this, so we jumped into action. Jenille animated the pot cover Fimimoji, Sheraine assembled the assets, and I updated our Giphy account with the new animated stickers and gifs.
The Giphy moderation process took a while, which is understandable since they want to ensure new content is safe. But it was a bit nerve wracking because we were running against the clock to have them ready in time for the Olympics finals. After a few exchanges with Giphy, we were officially approved and the animated dutch pot gif and other celebratory stickers were born.
To help the gifs show up first in search results, Jamaican Twitter rallied round and proudly shared them with their followers. It worked! We distributed our digital dutch pot covers to the hands of fans in the Twitter stands just before the women’s 100M finals. The timeline was loud!
Give it up for the gifs
Want to see us do more work like this? There’s a few ways you can support!
You can leave a tip in our tip jar for as many coffees as you’d like 😊. Each one boosts our batteries to come up with new ideas.
You can also send us vibes! 🥳 We’d love to read your comments, feedback and requests while sipping said coffee. A few requests have also come in for us to add the animated sticker packs on Gboard and Telegram. Let us know if you want to use them there too.
Plus- what’s the next fimimoji you want to see? Tweet us at @fimimoji and let’s chat. Big up yuhself!
Kenia is a founder of ListenMi, an animation and design studio that helps brands attract their tribe through storytelling, design and cultural digital products. Give this post some👏 👏👏 if you’re thinking about this stuff, and share it with others who do too.
Keep in touch on twitter, instagram, or see more of the team’s work on ListenMi’s instagram.
