&Walsh releases emojis for graphic designers and the wider world all about “life in 2020”

Jessica Walsh’s New York agency &Walsh has released hundreds of emojis created specifically for graphic designers to add to their Slack channels, Instagrams and more, as well as a set for the wider world about working from home and “life in 2020”. The designer-targeted emojis play on every design in-joke you can think of, jabbing fun at clients, hipsters, and all the tropes of designer life, from deadlines to laptop stickers, imploding inboxes, file naming and eyedropper usage, not to mention tweaking Adobe icons to comedic effect. There's even emoji portraits of famous designer names including Paula Scher, Susan Kare, Eddie Opara, Debbie Milman, Mona Chalabi, Steven Heller and her old partner Stefan Sagmeister.

The emojis aimed at the rest of society feature jokes about what to wear for a virtual meeting, depressing news headlines, and wanting to ‘reset’ 2020.

Jessica Walsh hopes the images can help us “express ourselves in isolation, as communication is all digital. We’re all going through unique/difficult times, and this calls for new emojis to communicate these shared struggles. We hope these can provide some delight or comic relief to people's day... or just make it a little easier to communicate how shitty people are feeling!”

The designer emojis project actually started last year, Walsh tells It's Nice That. “As visual people, we LOVE emojis as a fun way to express our emotions and add joy to our conversations. However, we felt the current emoji set was limiting for the unique things we go through as designers.” Then, when Covid-19 happened, the team began to add emojis that related to life during the crisis. Walsh and designer Rachel Denti started many of the ideas, but eventually, the entire team contributed to the set.

“These are some of my favourites,” she says, “but I love so many of them.”

“I had a hard time deciding to stop and picking an end date to release the project,” Walsh continues. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and in the last weeks I kept coming up with new ideas. It's also interesting to note there is a big difference between designing Slack emojis that can be used at small scale and sticker pack emojis that can be used on Giphy / iMessage stickers. We designed certain emojis to work at tiny sizes, others take advantage of sticker size which allows us to create more complexity in the design. There was a lot of testing involved on many different platforms.”

The packs can be downloaded for Slack, iMessage (free on the App Store), Whatsapp, and email. They are also on Giphy so users can add them to Instagram Stories.