I interpreted the prompt in two ways. First, by “hometown” I understood my home country Latvia and I tried to create two emojis that would reflect the values important to it. Following this idea, I created the “LV 100” emoji that is dedicated for Latvia’s centennial which takes place this year. At the same time, I wanted to create an emoji that would share some of the Latvian values with others. For that reason I created the face emoji, which reflects the traditional Latvian summer solstice celebrations. Many interesting festivities take place during that time, but the ones reflected are the tradition of men wearing headbands made out of oak leaves as well as the fact that cheese is at the forefront of every meal during the solstice.

My other interpretation for “hometown” was something that only me and my closest friend group from home can relate to. I chose to create a pack of yogurt that we not only love, but also for some weird reason joke about a lot.

To create the emojis I considered drawing them by hand but realized that it would be difficult for me to edit them. On top of that, I feel like sharing emojis on paper is not common (or rather even a little weird). I used Inkscape which is a great open source tool. Only after having finished most of the emojis I realized that I also could have used the drawing screens in the library, which would have been an interesting experience.

I sent my emojis to the two friends from the friend group that I referred to before only saying that I require their feedback for a class assignment. First they evaluated the face emoji. They said that the face was too yellow, which to me was a little surprising because I had obtained the RGB values for the face from Google’s face emojis. He probably said that because messenger (which is the platform I used to communicate with them) does use a little darker emojis and is probably the most used platform for emoji communication. Learning from messenger emojis I also introduced a color gradient to the face. Asides that, my friends were the ones who came up with the cheese idea.

When evaluating the “LV100” and the yogurt emoji my friends raised a problem of how specific these emojis are. That is, “LV100” could only be used this year and the yogurt emoji by default is only understandable to us. I took this criticism into account and changed the “LV100” emoji to just “LV”. As the yogurt emoji was meant to be an inside joke, I did not follow up on that criticism. However, my friends also pointed out that it is a little difficult to understand that the emoji is reflecting a yogurt pack, which is fair because I found it difficult to draw it. In my initial version I had not included a cap from which one could drink the yogurt, therefore I added that after the conversations with my friends.