These days I have the distinguished honor to serve as Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee Chair.
❢ Noto Emoji Font ❢ UX for Emoji Keyboard | Design team: Shiraz Fuman, Erik Carter
In addition to my work with Unicode I spend my days googling — working with products to improve our experience communicating digitally. Sometimes this means using machine learning, augmented reality and other buzzwords as we create composable expressive features for Google.
❢ Minis ❢ Design Direction | Design team: Shannon May, Ryan Sands, Helen Tseng |
One of my first projects at the goog was to craft a feature called "minis" that uses a combination of neural networks and artistry to turn your selfie into a personalized emoji sticker pack. Snap a selfie and it’ll return a illustrated version of you, generated on the fly, with customization options so you can personalize the images.
❢ Noto Color Emoji ❢ Creative Direction | Design team: Fiona Herse Woo and Shiraz Fuman
Noto Color Emoji is an open source emoji font! And, it may look familiar: it's used everywhere from Gmail, ChromeOS, YouTube, and many Android environments … as well as other places you'd least expect to find emoji. Read more about emoji here.
Noto Emoji is the black and white companion to our Noto Color Emoji. FREE (🆓!) for all your (including but not limited to) printed matter 📖, eink reader 📟, tattoo 💪🖋️, coloring book 🖍️, engraving 🔡, laser cutting 🎨, word processing 📝, web dev 💻 needs🖤🤍. Download here
❢ Emoji Kitchen ❢ Creative Direction, Design, Illustration
As emoji gain in popularity due to their usefulness in digital communications, we see a demand to play with them more like words — mashing them together, turning nouns into verbs, breaking them apart to create entirely new concepts. Available on Android only, gboard allows users to do just that. It works on messaging apps like whatsapp, IG Stories, FBM, telegram, twitter, gmail, and a number of others. Oh, and I handcrafted each one of these thousands of blessed and cursed characters. :-P
❢ Camera Effects ❢ Design Team: Erik Carter, Emily Meinhardt, Tracy Ma, Zach Lieberman
We live in a a selfie culture and photography in the form of a selfie is a very direct form of expression. Illustration, on the other hand, empowers people to define themselves - it’s warmer and less fraught than reality. Our team created nearly 100 dumb camera effects for gboard, Duo, Allo, and Android Messages.
I love illustrating science books — ‘The Origins of (Almost) Everything’ takes a look at the Universe's origin stories.
✆ Research ☃ Illustration ✄ Design | Introduction by Stephen Hawking | Written by Graham Lawton | Edited by Georgina Laylock and Katie Rogers
Fast Company calls it "best-looking sciencebook ever created."
No big deal. 🤑💸💰💵
I also write kids books — Infographics even a child could understand.
✆ Research ☃ Illustration ✄ Design | Edited by Jenny Bloom | Additional research by Simon Rogers | Published by Big Picture Press
I surround myself by folks who are smarter than I am— my best years at the NYT were spent collaborating on all aspects of a story. Picking up the phone and calling experts, dabbing with code, drawing, writing, and eating Schnippers.
Battle Cries, New York Times | ✄ Design ⚡ Coding ☃ Illustration ✎ Writing | Produced with Tom G and Wilson Andrews
Editing is about strengthening the idea of a story. Design is often a bullshit word to articulate that process.
Killing Bin Laden, Bloomberg Businessweek | ✄ Designer ✎ Writer | 🕵 Editor: Barrett Sheridan
Words mean things — my writing style is best described as throwing together letters that form words that hopefully convey ideas.
Witches in America?" for the New York Times Book Review | ☃ Illustration | Art Director — Matt Dorfman
You may have noticed by now that I have no drawing vanity — can barely draw so my pieces are 90% idea 10% execution.
Let Twitter Be Twitter for New York Magazine | ☃ Illustration | Art Director — Karishma Sheth
I love working with a limited set of rules to tell a story — which is probably why reworking ascii appeals to me.
New Yorker | Art Director: Nicholas Blechman
… and minesweeper — everywhere I go I see minesweeper
Favorite Video Games, Medium.com | ☃ Illustration | ✄ Art direction: Erich Nagler
When not googling, I find comfort in structured drawings — using the abstract language of shapes, patterns, and the established rules of geometry brings me a lot of joy. I don't know why. I don't need to know why, I just do it.
A selection from my sketchbooks
Experimentation and collaboration — Doesn’t stop with working in media or in “tech”. I’m not sure what I am gonna do next and that usually leads me some new.
