My coworker had just finished typing up the craziest story in a DM. I was searching for the perfect emoji to react with… and I couldn’t find it. I settled for the 🤦 but I really wanted something more :headdesk:. It was time to investigate.

Here at Cohesive, we’re big fans of Slack. We use it to manage our day-to-day job flow, corral general subject discussions (#design, #dev, #ideas), and even hold quicklinks to our favorite restaurant delivery menus. slackbot jimmy john’s brings up a link to their online delivery page.

Since we’ve been working from home for weeks, we’ve been even more immersed in Slack. Looking for a way to bring the team some joy, I spied these custom designer emoji from &Walsh.

“PERFECT” I thought. This is extremely relatable stuff. They were kind enough to make the emojis free to download, so I grabbed the ZIP and headed to my Slack dashboard.

Once on the Customize Screen, hit that big green button that says Add Custom Emoji.

You can drag and drop from your desktop or a folder, or click Upload Image to navigate to your image.

One note: Slack says square images under 128Kb with transparent backgrounds work best. Some of the emoji I found were solid backgrounds but they didn’t look too bad.

You can also use GIFs — don’t limit yourself to static images.

Give your emoji a memorable name! It’s easier to type than searching for tiny emojis in the Slack picker. 👍

Let’s hop over to Slack now and check out what we’ve got! You’ll find these emojis where you find the other ones — click that emoji-lookin’ button to see your handiwork. Look at those gorgeous lil’ pixels!

Finally, bask in the glory of your superior reacts.

Conclusion

We don’t yet know how long we’ll be working from home, but hopefully these cool custom Slack emoji help bring a bit of levity to your channels. Until next time, ✌️.

(this article was originally published on Medium)