How to Turn your Pet into an Emoji on Slack
In case you’re still living in 2014, you should know that Slack allows you to add custom emojis to your team database.
We love adding custom emojis at Meetup, but when we figured out that we could turn our pets into emojis, we officially went nuts for it.
Your pet is very special and deserves to be enshrined in the digital space. Let me show you how.
1. Choose a good picture of your pet
First, start with a clear picture of your pet’s face.
Keep in mind that emojis are square, so you want to choose an angle with an even shape.
You want to maximize the 128x128 pixels which are allowed.
2. Cut out the shape of their adorable noggin.
Open up your favorite image editor and digitally de-capitate your pet.
3. Make color adjustments and resize
The image might need some color adjustments, because emojis are small. For example, when I cut out the shape of Liza’s head from that picture, her little kitty face needed a bit more contrast an exposure to light it up.
For this example, I increased the contrast and increased the exposure so that her features would be more visible.
Then, resize your image so that the largest dimension (whether it is width or height) is 128 pixels (this is slack’s maximum image size).
4. Upload to Slack emoji base for your team
Customize this link for your team:
https://XXXXXXXXXX.slack.com/customize/emoji
Where the “XXXXXXXXXXX” is the url for your Slack team. You can upload your image on that page and it will add it to your organization database.
Upload your image and enter :yourpetsname: for the title of the emoji.
5. Check if it looks good. If it doesn’t, go back and edit the image.
When making an emoji, it often happens that I’m not quite satisfied with the final result. Once it gets so small, sometimes it doesn’t look the way you want.
Make sure that the emoji is as perfect as your beloved pet. Once you are happy with it, you can use it every day forever.
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If you need to start over, return to the emoji slack page for your team and run a Ctrl+F for the name of your emoji. Click on the ‘X’ to the right of your name to erase that emoji, so you can use the same emoji name again.
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Once you are satisfied with the result, you can impress your friends. Just go to slack and type :yourpetsname: to make the pet emoji appear.
Enjoy!
