Microsoft Teams
"Together Emojis"
What if there could be a specialized animation that plays right in my chat when I send a high-five emoji and a friend responds with the same emoji? Or two beer emojis that clink together? Or two surprised face emojis, and one can inhale the other like a vacuum? Great questions, glad you asked! Microsoft Teams' "Together Emojis" are the answer to such requests. A project led by Sam Cundall, I helped bring to life some of the iconic interactions that millions of Teams users have enjoyed since their debut.​
​We forewent the Lottie pipeline to achieve these, which afforded us much more flexibility and freedom than other in-app projects I've worked on such as the Turn-In Celebrations. We were able to compress these small animations into manageable PNG sequences, locked and loaded for dozens of interactions across chat windows in Teams.
I even had the amazing opportunity to co-host a Microsoft Fix. Hack. Learn. Week class where we onboarded other Microsoft motion designers who wanted to get in on the fun! Here is a quick recap video I edited to share highlights with the Microsoft FHL community at the end of the week.