Emoji Studio: Turning Slack Emojis into Culture Insights

Emoji Studio transforms custom Slack emojis from quirky reactions into a lens on team culture. By stitching together Slack’s API data with thoughtful visualizations, it reveals who’s creating, using, and shaping the tiny icons that power modern workplace conversations.

Why It Matters

Emojis act as cultural artifacts—but live in a messy, unstructured library.
No native way to explore usage, creation patterns, or top contributors.
Bulk management is painful, limiting cleanup and governance.

What I Built

The Emoji Dashboard connects to any Slack workspace, ingests emoji metadata, and surfaces it through an intuitive, high-performance UI.

Emoji Explorer: Searchable, filterable grid with creator, date, and bulk-download tools.
Analytics: Interactive charts for creation trends, name word-clouds, and creator leaderboards.
Management: One-click export and cleanup actions for large emoji libraries.

User Experience Highlights

Built with semantic HTML and shadcn components for accessibility and dark-mode support.
Client-side filtering and lazy loading keep performance snappy—even with thousands of emojis.
Hover-to-reveal tooltips, modal overlays, and chart-driven filtering tie exploration to insights.

Tech Stack

Next.js + React (TypeScript) for SSR and component-driven UI.
Recharts for data visualization.
JSZip & FileSaver for bulk downloads.
Server-side proxy to bypass CORS when fetching emoji images.

Future Roadmap

Track in-message emoji usage to surface adoption trends.
Break down insights by team or channel.
Detect emerging themes and cultural shifts automatically.
Export ready-made reports for leadership decks.

Key Takeaway

Even the most whimsical digital assets hold serious value when treated as data. Emoji Studio showcases how product thinking, thoughtful UX, and modern web tech can turn playful pixels into actionable cultural insights.

Notes

Case Study: Emoji Studio

Case Study: Emoji Studio