Flat whites and Nikes: Moving Brands creates much-needed emojis for city creatives

When Apple released a new set of racially diverse and sexually liberated emojis earlier this year, there was one question on many minds: where is the avocado? That velvety, pale green pear has, along with innumerable coffee orders and limited-edition trainers, become the opiate of the millennial masses. I suppose Apple products and emojis themselves also belong on that ever-growing list of modern-day vices disguised as necessities, but there’s just one problem with emojis: they’re not particularly representative or pertinent to the coffee-chugging, Nike-footed set of 20-somethings that rely on them.

After plans were announced to release another 35 emojis that still fail to tap into the zeitgeist, the team at Moving Brands has taken matters into their own hands. As an agency made up of city-dwelling creatives split between London, New York and San Francisco, they asked themselves what was missing and what they would add to the emoji set in order to better represent their lives. From clothes to coffee to tech, the results revealed a self-deprecating look at the day-to-day of young creatives in the city.

Koalas and pandas make way for French bulldogs, pugs and pigeons, and flat screens and smartphones replace pagers, CDs and VHS. Perhaps most tellingly, whilst the lone cup of black coffee becomes 27, Moving Brands point out that from the current 68 facial expressions to choose from, “we only really need a mild smile and a way to represent a nonchalant and equally noncommittal shrug.” Quite worryingly, 27 variations of coffee to two facial expressions sounds about right.