Alpine Reactions Project

What I Did

I was approached by a client working on their startup who needed some help regarding their platform. They wanted custom made emoji designs that would help add fun and inclusive communication capabilities to their platform. This project took some months of tinkering, a plethora of emails, a good old dousing of memes and overall fun!

Establishing strong visuals for branding

My client wanted a set of 3 mascots that would be instantly recognizable and loosely tied to the "mountain" theme that their application had. Because the theme was centered around mountains, my first thought was that the idea of an adorable abominable snow man (or Yeti) would be really fun and fitting. The client was on board for that and so we had to figure out the other two. My client suggested a Pine tree. Given the name of the application it made sense and we rolled with it. 2 mascots down, one more to go. Settling on the final mascot was a bit challenging, mainly because neither of us had a concrete idea of what would fit the theme and could still work as a 3rd mascot. The client mentioned to me that they wanted something similar to Google's iconic blobmoji designs, but not so similar that one would be mistaken for the other and vice versa. We initially tried a custom blob emoji, but that indeed felt too similar to blobmojis. The great thing about the blobmojis is that their shape inherently lends itself to expressiveness and fluid movement. After much thought, we decided to replace the blob idea and have a silly organce cat using similar shape language as the blobmoji.

A Yeti, A Cat And A Pine Tree Walk Into A Bar...

My main focus was to create something memorable, adorable, and functional! Emojis should be an avenue for creative expression that is engaging and occasionally funny to share with colleagues and friends alike!

The Yeti

Big. Burly. Fluffy. The first emoji I worked on as part of the Alpine family of emojis. The Yeti is calm in nature, and is very sweet, contrary to stereotypical beliefs! I wanted to create a character that was very inherently tied to the idea of snowy mountains and nature.

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Update: I recently took a class on animations using LottieLab and managed to bring our big, burly friend to life!

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The Cat

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The Cat is the most playful of the bunch and is my most favorite of all the designs. It's the right mixture of goofy, adorable and colorful! As mentioned before, the design of the cat is based off of the blobmoji shape language. The client wanted a character that had playful features and traits. Hence why the emoji has "squash and stretch" style reactions.

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The Pine Tree

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The Pine Tree. Our discussion around the design philosophy behind this character was that they would be the most grounded and relaxed of the 3 characters. The interesting thing about this character is that there exist so many different kinds of trees, and so that opens up new opportunities for creative expression. This is particularly helpful for creating variations of the character!

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Animated the Tree using Lottie Lab as well! I may revisit this animation to make it a bit smoother, but I am overall happy with the result!

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