Mr. Monstera
How are you feeling today? What was your first thought upon waking up? I remember the days of AOL instant messenger or AIM. In fact I might have used AIM way longer than other folks who were moving on to Facebook. I can think of times where I would precisely compose away messages, some of them including emoticons.
When I assigned myself the task of creating a set of emoticons to use in the messaging app Telegram, I immediately thought of these memories of talking to my friends and the difficulties I had expressing myself through text. A lot of the time, emoticons were the answer.
Now emoticons, digital stickers, and GIFs can say so much more and there is a lot more room for creativity. When I set off to create these emoticons, there were a few things I wanted to achieve. I needed a character, an interesting way for the character to emote, and for it to feel fun. After playing around with a few ideas I came up with the character Mr. Monstera who was very much inspired by the character art for Forky from Pixar’s Toy Story 4.
First of all I love plants which is why I decided to base the character around a species of Philodendron called monstera. Secondly I knew I could utilize the leaves like a set of eyebrows to help the character emote. I thought about how my own plants get sad and wilt when I forget to water them on time. The fun factor I knew I could achieve through the design, a good color scheme and a cuteness level inspired by the one and only Forky.
The next hurdle was to come up with the feelings I wanted Mr. Monstera to express. More important than that was the research that went into finding universally understood ways to display these emotions. For that I looked into multiple character styles of typing emoticons like the latin sideways style :-) or the Japanese kaomoji style (>_<) and the emoji faces that went along with them. 😁 😖
In the end I had ten different emoticons, but there is always room for more. Especially when expressing yourself can be so fun and healthy. Mr. Monstera is here to help you with that.
Copy and paste this link in the Telegram app to use https://t.me/addstickers/MrMonstera