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