Emojization: Visual Communication with Emojis

A comprehensive and highly visual overview, from the cultural and theoretical background to the amazing variety and everything one needs to know about the creative potential of emojis.

A means of expression for billions of people, emojis have established their function in our everyday lives. Increasingly complex in quality and quantity, these written language companions have long since transcended the realm of written communication to become a pop culture phenomenon of their own. This handbook is a manual and source of inspiration for anyone seeking to understand and use the full potential of emojis in visual communication.

It combines cultural, historical, and theoretical backgrounds with practical application examples. Selected works from recent years demonstrate the formal diversity of emojis and offer inspiration for one’s own work. Specific cases are used to show how emojis can be used in very different ways in the implementation of design tasks and creative projects to thus become part of visual identities – from Pentagram’s branding work for Waze and Channel 4 to the cutting edge of AR technology used in YouTube Shorts and GIPHY emojis.

Featuring elaborate four-colour sprayed edges and a pull-out sheet of kawaii stickers, Emojization is an essential design reference as beautiful as it is functional.

About the Author

Graphic designer Deborah Enzmann with a degree at the Lucerne School of Design worked at a branding agency in Zurich and then completed her doctorate on the topic of emojis at the Offenbach University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She currently teaches communication and media theory at the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences.