For this assignment I had to create three emojis that relate to my hometown. The very definition of hometown sparked some inner debate and left me perplexed for a while, but for the scope of the assignment, I decided to take the small town in which I spent most of my first 4 years growing up. Teteven is situated in the heart of the Balkan mountain range in central Bulgaria, the houses are seated in a small cutout of the forest and surrounded in every direction by tall mountain peaks. The local population has names for every peak and every stretch of land between the town and the top of the peaks belongs to the original towners. Now, there are around 10,000 people living in the town, although its population peaked 30,000 in 1990s when the town was a local industrial center. Now tourism is the only commercial activity in this quit town. 

When I was first confronted with this task I was lost and had no idea where to start. Part of the problem was that that some tasks/activities that came to my mind immediately when thinking about my hometown were already captured by built-in emojis in my phone, and I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. I wanted to create something that couldn’t be explained with one of the existing emojis, although it could be communicated by a combination of them. Hence, I began to brainstorm activities that I used to do with my friends when I was in there in the summer, the sort of things that everyone in the town would be doing on a regular basis. The first thing that came to my mind was a picture of the mountain peak right across our house, where there is a lush forest and hiking track. I used to go hiking and playing there with my friends, so it was a location that we were often talking about in our childhood. Hence, I imagined myself as a child now, and thought to myself “how can I send this location/hiking route/ to my friends with one emoji only. Then I began to draft the image of the mountain peak and the river underneath it. 

This is the first draft of my emoji:

Then I sent it to one of my friends Radi, without any prior explanation of what he was looking at. His first reaction was: “This is a nice drawing. Did you make it? What am I looking at?” Then I said it is something from our hometown, and he replied: “Is it [that] peak???”

I explained what I was trying to depict, and he agreed that it looks similar, but the brought up one point which evaded my attention – the peak was not grey. There were some rocks on top of the peak, but it does not show as grey, as it is usually covered by low shrubs. So the second iteration of my emoji removes the grey peak and makes it green to match the rest of the forest beneath it.

The second emoji represents one of my favorite activities that I would do every summer, and every time the weather allows it – swinging in a hammock between the trees, only the sky and the sun above. Since there was no official emoji to show this activity, I thought it would be nice whenever one of my friends texts me “wyd?” to be able to reply just with one emoji that captures the scenery. 

For the first iteration of the emoji I wanted to keep it simple and make it as stripped-down as possible. Hence, I drew two simple trees and a hammock between them. 

This time my friend Radi already had context about what I am doing, so his reaction immediately connected the hammock with what I used to do all summer. He also said it looked like a “creepy smiley face”. LOL. His suggestions for improvement were to include the sky and sun to make the emoji more wholesome and easier to situate the activity in its environment – outdoors in the open air, and so that it doesn’t look like a creepy smiley face. 

The third emoji captures an activity that relates more universally to the people in the town, not so much to my own experiences. Needless to say, a community in the heart of the Balkans in a drinker’s community, in fact there are legends that men from this region of the Balkan can drink all night and not get affected by the alcohol. Hence, even young people in the town drink casually. I wanted my emoji to capture the social aspect of drinking together and having a good time, hence I decided to depict the moment of clinging the bottles together to say “Cheers!”. For us, Balkan people, this is part of tradition and permeates the social and family environment, especially in mountain areas where the climate is harsher and people use drinking as a recreational activity to escape the rough conditions outside. 

Radi’s initial reaction was laughter. He found the emoji on point with the social and cultural conditioning of young people in this town, and he agreed it might simplify their texting life. His feedback was to try to represent the clinging of the bottles better, to highlight the social aspect of drinking and the good times of it.

In the aftermath of this exercise, I realized how hard it is to capture a universal experience and represent an activity in such a way that everyone understands its meaning and rich sociocultural implications. Also, graphically, I wish I was able to create more simplistic and minimalistic emojis, so that the reader’s attention is grabbed immediately and the they convey meaning instantly, without the need to inspect the details.