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.