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Pictospeak

research & pixel-art design
Swift & SwiftUI development
storyboarding, animation & rotoscoping

  • App Design
  • Motion Design
  • Pixel Art

A satirical dystopia in which people are only allowed to communicate through emoji.

Have you ever picked up a new word from the internet? Ever seen someone say “unalive” instead of “die”? Pictospeak is inspired by how social media algorithms are changing our speech patterns, and explores a satirical dystopia in which people are only allowed to communicate through emoji.

Research and design

Exploring the history of emoji for this project was fascinating, and led me to the work of Shigetaka Kurita, who designed the original emoji set for Japanese carrier DoCoMo in 1999. Nowadays, emojis could be considered the world’s first global language, and are taking on unique meanings of their own.

My research also took me down the rabbit hole of Japanese smartphone technology as a whole. Nicknamed “Garakei” (a combination of Galapagos Islands, known for their unique ecosystem and wildlife + Keitai, common term for a mobile phone that you ‘take with you’ in Japanese), mobile phone technology is widely understood to have developed much quicker in Japan.

The full Pictospeak emoji set

I designed all the emojis in the pixel-art software Aseprite, challenging myself to create a modern interpretation of Kurita's classic designs.

Creating the app

The second stage was to make the Pictospeak emojis actually work on my daily devices. The app lets you create your own animations to replace phrases and sentences, and works in iMessage with sticker functionality. I handled distribution through TestFlight at first, so testers could download the app and send feedback.

The unique “selling point” of the app is that you can create animated emojis, turning phrases of speech into a single image.

This linked to my concept of the ‘replacement’ of human language, and I really wanted to see what kind of things people wanted to say and how they employed the designs in daily use.

Pictospeak app screen one Pictospeak app screen two Pictospeak app screen three Pictospeak app screen four

Pictospeak in daily use Pictospeak in daily use

I wrote the app wholly in Swift and SwiftUI.

The trailer

The third and final stage of the project was to wrap it all up with a snazzy, communicative trailer, parodying minimalist tech adverts. Set to Remi Wolf’s “Hello Hello Hello”, I storyboarded the ad in Final Cut Pro and animated it in Apple Motion. It was also my first attempt at rotoscoping, with my friend starring as a “brainwashed user” of the app.

UAL Foundation featured Pictospeak as a standalone post on their official Instagram, as an example of what the course can produce. See the post