The Found Emoji Project app for iPhone and iPad

“Finding the emoji missing from your lexicon”

An alternative, street-art style emoji keyboard for use on:
- iMessage
- WhatsApp
- Facebook messenger

The Found Emoji Project is an art and technology collaboration between illustrator Andi Rivas in Cadiz, Spain and digital agency Gravitywell, in Bristol, UK.

The rise in popularity of emoji on an international scale has been incredible. In just a few short years, a new language has emerged, one that crosses cultural borders and integrates with older languages.

The Unicode emoji set has helped ensure that the visual representation of each character is largely standardised across the world. But, just as with traditional languages, meaning and interpretation can vary. For example, the ‘see no evil monkey’ emoji on iOS is often used to portray embarrassment.

Although more emoji are added to the Unicode set with reasonable regularity they all represent a very sanitised version of communication. To get around the limitations of the character set, users are repurposing existing emoji to get the message across. The more well-known examples are the aubergine/eggplant and the peach!

Concepts for new emoji will be crowd-sourced - we’ll take the best and most original ideas submitted by followers each day. We’ll keep the original meaning hidden so we can observe how others interpret the images