Project Intent
Emoji are indispensable for daily communication. They are practical ( ), funny ( ) and sometimes quite bizarre ( ). For us, emoji are much more than colorful images decorating fun short messages. We think they are rather part of an important and exciting development: the return of pictorial symbols to written communication. For the first time in history, it is possible to communicate with a combination of letters and icons. Now it becomes feasible to say things and convey meanings that were previously impossible.
Unfortunately, the creative variety of emoji has been rather limited so far, especially when compared to the incredible number of available fonts. At the moment, there is only a dozen emoji sets, most of them from big tech companies. These emoji are visually adapted to the respective appearance of their software platforms. In addition, the usage rights are often very restrictive (e.g. the terms of use of Apple’s emoji).
That is why we have developed OpenMoji as the first open source and independent emoji system to date. When designing the OpenMoji system, we have developed visual guidelines that are not linked to a specific branding. In addition, our goal was to design emojis that integrate well in combination with text.
OpenMoji is an open-source project of 50+ students and 2 professors of the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd (Design University) and external contributers.
Authors & Team
Acknowledgements & Many Thanks
- Paul Raschke – Helping with implemention and design of this site
- Miles Johnson – Emojibase where the OpenMoji data structure and meta informations are based on
- Brad Erickson – SVGinOT Color Font Builder which is used to to generated the OpenMoji fonts
- Franz of Fontself for swift help and support
- Sam Eckert for creating the iOS OpenMoji App
- Emoji description texts by Emojipedia – Thanks Jeremy Burge
- Felix Häberle – web development improving accessibility and responsiveness
- Kris Kowal – vastly improving the OpenMoji build system
- Stephan Bogner for porting the website to Astro
Contact
Daniel Utz & Benedikt Groß
Daniel D0T Utz @ hfg – gmuend D0T de
Benedikt D0T Gross @ hfg – gmuend D0T de