It’s easy to dismiss emojis; silly faces and undefined symbols that are a language on their own and only for teenagers. However, it’s important to know that many written symbols from today date back to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Emojis transcend borders, languages and technology. And the emoji language is integrated into your mobile phone, listed between Dutch and Estonian. Plus, with less emojis than three-character domain names, there’s definitely a supply issue.

Last year, London-based studio Koto burst onto the design scene; priding itself on understanding the essence of a brand and making things come alive. The three founders (James Greenfield, Caroline Matthews and Jowey Roden) recently spoke to It’s Nice That about their collaboration with Coca-Cola and the 38 emojis they’ve designed for the brand.

Coca Cola was looking for functional emojis that were simple and engaging. At that time, a designer that Koto had worked with online happened to be working for Coca Cola. He decided to approach the team to pitch ideas for this project.

The Koto team approached the project first with construction of the emoji and it’s explosion into popular culture. After which, they looked into the history of the face depicted through folk art and global culture. They looked at the nuances of each culture and where characters were most playful. Finally, key branding elements of Coca-Cola: its colour, ribbon, and logotype, were all used to conceive the 38 bottle cap emojis.

According to Koto, it was easier to design for smaller markets as compared to bigger ones. This was due to the added pressure from millions of customers. The key issue that they faced was making the emojis recognizable as they’re specifically made for Coke instead of just turning the usual emoji’s red.

Plenty of brands have tried to make their own emoji sets, many have failed. What are your thoughts on Coca-Cola’s bottle cap emojis?

Source: http://www.itsnicethat.com/features/lecture-in-progress-parts-of-the-process-koto-041016