Creating personal emoji
This is my first article on Medium and here I want to share my experience of creating personal emoji for my colleagues.
Origins of the idea
In our small and friendly company, it is common to congratulate colleagues on the anniversary of their work. Usually our company give an useful book on self-development — certainly is a necessary thing, but I would like to add some creativity to the benefit. So an idea had come up to give a personal emoji in addition to a useful book. So, moreover, I wanted to achieve a new creative test.
In searching of inspiration
The first phase of the work was analytical — I made a moodboard with a selection of favorite examples. I did not want to paint Emoji in the style of yellow emoticons with huge eyes and broken proportions. For this purpose, the classic cartoon style with bright colors, simple and clear shadows, a dark outline was ideally suited. Also, for every Emoji it should be to add something special that distinguishes each employee from the another, therefore it is advisable to approach the issue with a bit of humor, but do not overdo it!
The first victim was Daria, our full-stack developer. Daria loves unicorns very much and the question of choosing an image (or a special feature) for Emoji was decided by itself.
Step number one: sketch
Paper and pencil became the starting point in the process of creating the first emoji. I tried to choose the front view of the face, however, there were exceptions, if composition demanded of it. I drew a smile to all the staff, or almost to everyone (depending on the original image).
Step number two: outline
I inserted the paper drawing in the graphics editor and outlined all the shapes with curves. Then i made a preliminary fill to estimate the colour- grade and after the final selection of colors I started to add details. To make the picture doesn’t seem flat, i added some shadows and marked the contours of the face with lines. That is how my first emoji came to be. This is Daria.
Optimization for Slack
When i added emoji to Slack, had to give up small details, because the required size should not exceed 128 pixels, and in such a small image the details only create unnecessary noise. I also had to correct the thickness of the lines so the necessary elements were not visually get lost.
Sticker workshop
Next stickers were drawing easier and faster, due to that I already had a base from parts of the previous ones and I just took them and collect them as a constructor.
So I have got a small collection with funny faces of my colleagues. However, it has yet to add several employees.
Thanks for reading !!! :)
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +400,714 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
