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ELH Challenge 77: Emoji For the Win

In: Elearning Heroes ChallengeShowing my Work

Full disclosure: this was another challenge I wasn’t sure I was going to participate in. But then I saw the great Emoji Dick conversation video that David put up as an example and once again, I thought, “I’m in.” I’ve been listening to the Build and Launch podcast a lot lately (check it out if you get a chance) and I’ve been super excited about creating and shipping (in the product people lingo) a new site I’m calling Go Design Something. I want to create another space where instructional designers of all stripes can be challenged to make things. I plan to begin podcasting as well as creating some elearning of my own with lessons on integrating coding and elearning authoring tools. Sign up to be notified once I launch the site: http://godesignsomething.co/ [Shameless plug over.] Anywhoodle, I started to see this as an opportunity to extend last week’s animation challenge and to talk a bit about why I think making is so important for instructional designers.

Emoji…

I’m one of those weirdo’s who often still uses full, grammatical English when I text so I’m not very familiar with the variety of different emoji and their meanings. I started by writing out some short sentences that I wanted to say and then looking up emoji that might help me say those things. I used Emojipedia as my reference of choice. Emoji is quite limited as far as language goes so it was a great exercise to think about an image I might use to illustrate “Out there,” for instance.

Doin’ it For Myself

I often spend a lot of time crawling Creative Market to find just the right image. This time, urged on by my recent drawing mania (more on that on Thursday), I decided to create my own. I used the real emoji as a reference and went to town in Adobe Illustrator. See video for documentary evidence.

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You Want ‘Em?

I realized that a lot of the great folks in the Articulate community are big on offering things for free, which I haven’t done in the past because I always purchased my images, but I thought I’d give these away. So if you need a few emoji or flat icons, here ya go. Take, use: do so in remembrance of me.

The Audio

Like I wrote above, I wanted to tell a little story and I loved that Emoji Dick inspiration. I also really loved that intimate telephone call sound quality. It makes it feel as though we’re a part of a private conversation. So I wanted to emulate that. I recorded my audio using Audacity and then I used the telephone equalization effect to simulate that same audio quality.

Audacity UI
Using Audacity

The Story

Last but not least, here’s the emoji story. Enjoy!

My emoji story
Click on the Screenshot to View the Demo