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Celebrating World Emoji Day my way

A quick recap of the chaotic, emoji-filled adventures and community creations from World Emoji Day 2026!

Felix Schneider
Jul 20, 20263 min read1 read
1

really like emojis. You might have noticed this last Friday, the 17th of July, 2026, if you were a little active on BlueSky or visited npmx.dev.

Art

Around two weeks ago, a random idea hit me: I wanted to create the @npmx.dev logo just with emojis. This made me realize that it would be a perfect fit for a so-called "noodle" in npmx. It is our way of continuing the beloved Doodles from Google. But as you might know, Doodles have meaning bound to dates. Just for the sake of it, I prompted for the date that would be most associated with emojis. Turns out, World Emoji Day was right around the corner. Well, Felix means “the lucky one” in Latin for a reason.*1

Hooked by the idea, I immediately jumped into @figma.com to create the noodle, not knowing that it would take me over 4h to copy-paste enough emojis, sort them by color and position them to form the letters "npmx".

But the effort was not in vain. After sharing it on the npmx Discord, people really liked it. And they had some good ideas. Like @graphieros.npmx.social, who suggested that it would be fun if some emojis would randomly blink or swap.

While this threw my already tight schedule into disarray, it didn't mean that we couldn't achieve it.*2 And oh boy, the dedication of one special community member really had us all on the edge of our seats.

@jviide.iki.fi went completely over the top and dropped this bomb straight in the midst of our #noodle channel:

What an absolute legend!

They hooked the entire prototype into the npmx landing page and created a wonderful noodle archive entry. Therefore, you can now enjoy our wonderful creation for the rest of the day or your life - depending on your dedication. Speaking of which...

Dedication

At the same time, I was planning a little fun challenge for the 17th of July: Only post emojis on BlueSky. No links. No visual text.

@lopeadebesin.bsky.social, @graphieros.npmx.social, @willow.sh and @oppi.li joined me and together we posted over 84 unique emojis. I myself might have overdone it a little bit as I published 16 quotes, one post, three reposts and 35 replies that day, sending a total of 127 grinning little faces, symbols and individually selected visually appealing Unicode characters over the Atmosphere. None of which included any letters by our strict rules.

The irony in all of this is that I have now written an entire post consisting almost entirely of letters and image bytes without a single emoji. One could say that after such a special day, I need to restock my emoji supply, which might take some time...


Ha! I doubt it! 😝
Here are all 84 unique emojis we collected together that day:

🐶💯🚀🎂🤩👏📸😌⚽️🍻🫶📦💬♾️😎🙌😉💙🎥💤✅👖🟰🤣🥰❤️⛓️✈️🌍🙏0️⃣🥹🐐👉🏢🔥👥✨🥲🎸🍰🥳☕️1️⃣🕛✍️™️🤯👜😋🫂📡🎉😇🔄☃️🤝👀😂🎞️🔑🫡🙈🌐🌌👻🤘⌛🧑‍💻🔓📅📀🌀💐👁️🤔😍🧁⤴️💪🙂😴

In the end, there is nothing left to say, apart from:

Thanks to everyone involved! Until next year.


  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_(name)
  2. https://roe.dev/blog/virtuous-circle

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