It’s World Emoji Day! 📅🎂🎉

Today is World Emoji Day, a worldwide celebration of the humble emoji and everything they represent. Starting out on Japanese mobile phones in 1999, emoji gained international appeal once they appeared on iOS and Android. Now there are emoji pillows, emoji clothing, and even an emoji movie 🤨

Emoji can have literal and figurative meanings, and plenty of users on Glitch have used emoji for all types of fun and creative projects. Let’s have a look!

Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) is a self-proclaimed ‘Emojineer’ at Google, and her projects on Glitch embody the whimsical and delightful spirit that World Emoji Day is all about!

This is a perfect app for World Emoji Day — an English to emoji translator. Paste in your text, and the app will do its best to change that text into emoji.

Monica’s emoji garden isn’t just beautiful to look at it, it’s also helped inspire a number of different remixes, including an emoji desert and an emoji-filled otherworldly voidscape. What type of emoji setting can you create?

Patrick Weaver (@patrickweaver) is the Learning Design Manager at New York-based nonprofit Mouse. He builds projects that put a new emoji-fied spin on nostalgic games and services. Let’s look at some of them:

When I was a teenager, I loved making computer wallpapers. Now you can make your own wallpaper using the emoji of your choice. Put it on your laptop, your mobile phone, or whatever digital device you like!

Minesweeper is a classic video game on Microsoft Windows, and Patrick has updated it for the emoji age. Plant your flag and find the treasure.

Monica and Patrick’s apps have been remixed and enjoyed by countless users, and there are several others who have built apps in the same spirit of emoji. Here are a few we really like.

Glitch user Jackson Calloway (@jcksncllwy) built Nomoji as a way to fill your screen with cascading flows of emojis.

Two emojis enter, but only one will emerge as victorious! Glitch user Axel Freeman (@axelfreeman) pits emojis against each other in a turn-based battle to the end. Which one will reign supreme?

This app from Glitch user Mikkel Malmberg (@mikker) behaves similar to Facebook Live videos. Remix the app to add the video of your choice, and have people react to it using emojis.

These apps are just a handful of the creative and fun ways that Glitch users are incorporating emoji into their work. Happy World Emoji Day! 😄