OpenMoji – an open source emoji and icon library from a designers point of view

The project started as a semester project by Interaction and Communication Design students, aiming to develop the first comprehensive open-source emoji and icon library from a designers point of view. The goal was to create a set that would look clean yet appealing.
It should contain categories that are not available in common libraries.

The varied set and the corresponding guidelines have been published so that every designer can create his own emojis and icons at any time and add them to the set.

Course

Emoji Open Source

Team

Interaction Design students
Communication Design students

Technologies

Adobe Illustrator
Sketch

Pixel and Vector Icons

Pixel Icons were created to get a feel for creating icons and to concentrate on the essentials. For this I chose the topic „Outdoor Sports“ and created a suitable set of different icons, which were composed of pixels.
The next step was to transform the Pixel Icons into Vector Icons. You can see a small selection of them in the following picture.

Unicode

Since the goal of the course is a unified emoji set, the next step was to define a style that everyone should use. After a three-week test phase in which a lot of experimentation and development took place, we decided on certain guidelines. According to this style guide, I created 34 emojis and icons that belong to different categories. Here you can see a small selection of the created symbols.

My categories

activities – game
flags
objects – lock
smileys – people – family
symbols – geometric
travel – places – hotel

Website

In order to draw attention to the library and make it accessible to everyone, a website was designed. My task was to develop, together as a team, an appealing concept that would educate users about the specifics of our emojis and give them the opportunity to become part of the team by creating their owns.
Have a look at the OpenMoji project by clicking on the picture.

Application Design

Change

Interface Design

Dogsday