The Challenge
Grindr's 3 million daily users were already communicating in emoji shorthand — using whatever stock symbols were close enough to what they actually meant. The product team found that users were sending the same messages on repeat: expressions the Unicode standard had never thought to include. The app needed an ownable creative language that reflected how its community actually talked.
The Objective
Design an emoji set — and the campaign built around it — that gave Grindr users a visual vocabulary that was genuinely theirs. The creative mandate was clear: make it fun, make it ownable, and never let the brand take itself too seriously.
The Creative Approach
The insight was to treat the emojis not as decorations but as sentences. I worked from the copywriter's tagline — "we speak your language" — and designed the campaign to prove it. Every deliverable, from OOH posters and billboards to GIFs for paid performance, was built around the idea that Gaymoji was a new grammar. I designed the Gaymoji logo from scratch and art directed across all campaign formats. The visual system had to hold at every scale — from a billboard on Sunset to a 72px thumbnail in a notification tray. Constraints like that sharpen decisions fast.
The team
We built this with Art Directors Helen Hahn and James Gamboa, Copywriter Corbett Trubey, and Creative Director Landis Smithers. A compact team with range.
Production Highlights
Production covered 500 illustrated emoji across 6 categories, a standalone Gaymoji app, an in-keyboard product, animated GIFs for paid performance media, OOH poster and billboard artwork across multiple formats, and a logo designed from scratch. Campaign assets ran across digital and physical placements simultaneously at launch.
The Impact
The launch drove a wave of international press — Fortune, the New York Times, Paper Magazine, The Advocate and more — positioning Gaymoji as one of the year's most culturally resonant product campaigns. The 500-piece set became a standalone app and an owned extension of the Grindr brand. A utility product became a cultural moment.
NYT · Fortune · Paper · Advocate
Press at launch
500+
Emojis shipped as standalone app and in-keyboard product
More Works
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