Create text-based emojis for your Slack team

Each emoji is perfectly sized, highly customizable and displays against light and dark themes.

Born out of need for communication during a pandemic

All at the same time we, at Postlight, experienced a pandemic, quarantine, and new WFH routine in 2020. I missed my teammates and being around them. We used communication tools, such as Slack, to stay in touch, but even then a human connection was missing.

Textmoji in the wild

So we made Textmoji as a way to feel close to one another despite working remotely indefinitely; as a way to have fun while creating and making; as a way to feel closer to one another without physically being together.

Gallery of creations

a few creations:

Creating your own textmoji

The user interface on Textmoji.app gives the users options to customize and preview their creations on light/dark backgrounds, depending on your preference of light or dark modes.

Textmoji Color Palettes

The colors, shapes, and fonts were chosen with careful considerations that they would provide enough contrast and legibility on both light and dark backgrounds.

We created Templates that the user can start with and then customize to their preferences. We highly encourage you go wild!

Mood boards

I compiled images, colors, and typographic art as inspiration for the templates. These are a few examples of my mood board explorations

Neon Arcade

01. Neon Arcade: a nod to 8bit, arcade style

Cheeky and Bold

02. Cheeky & Bold:

Primary and Elementary

03 Primary & Elementary:

Typography Explorations

Explorations of fonts and legibility - how many characters can fit until the textmoji became illegible and too small to read?

Unconventional orientations and directions of reading text

Fonts have "character"! They have interesting weights, orientations, and personality

I tested fonts with different shapes as the background

What's Next

To improve we are looking to address:

accessibility
new fonts
contrast

Ending Thoughts

At Postlight, we had a blast making and using textmojis. We are still working remotely indefinitely, and it will be even longer until we are comfortable working together again. But until then, we hope you have fun creating textmojis for your team too.

From our engineer:

"Communication can be hard. Nowadays, even more so. Textmoji may just seem like a simple web application for making silly text emoji, but those emoji help us communicate and feel closer to one another. To some, that might feel trivial. But to me, it’s more important than ever." - Preston Richey, Senior Engineer at Postlight

Reimagining digital communication on Slack