How to Participate in or Contribute to OpenMoji

OpenMoji is an open source emoji project run by 80+ students and 2 professors at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, together with external contributors. If you want to participate, the site's Participate & Contribute entry point is the starting place, and you can first browse the existing collection to see what kind of work is already done and where gaps might be. The project is free to use under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, so contributing also means your work joins a shared, openly licensed set.

What the project expects from contributors

OpenMoji is not a loose collection of individual artwork. The site states that all emojis follow a single style guide and "fit perfectly together," and that every emoji has been "carefully designed, tested and reviewed over many iterations." That consistency is the core constraint on any contribution:

• Style guide compliance matters more than individual flair. A new or revised emoji has to match the existing visual language.
• Unicode alignment matters. OpenMoji "carefully supports the Unicode Emoji standard" and currently tracks Emoji v17.0, so contributions generally need to map to a defined Unicode emoji rather than inventing a symbol.
• Review is part of the process. The "tested and reviewed over many iterations" wording signals that submissions go through feedback rather than being published directly.

Ways to get involved

1. Start by exploring the collection

Before proposing anything, look through the existing set. The site reports 4,495 emojis across many categories, including:

Exploring first tells you whether the emoji you have in mind already exists, and shows you the style you would need to match.

2. Use the Participate & Contribute route

The homepage presents Participate & Contribute as the dedicated path for people who want to join in. Treat it as the official entry point rather than contacting individuals, since the project is coordinated across a large student group, two professors, and external contributors.

3. Contribute within the project's structure

Because OpenMoji is an academic project with an external contributor community, useful contributions tend to fall into recognizable buckets:

• New emoji designs for Unicode characters that are not yet covered, drawn to the style guide.
• Revisions to existing emojis so they stay consistent as the set grows.
• Special interest categories, since the project explicitly ships categories beyond standard Unicode for technologies and design.
• Outlined variants, because OpenMoji supports both colored and outlined versions of its emojis.

4. Try the emojis in practice

The site also offers "try OpenMoji on your phone." Using the set in real contexts is a low-commitment way to understand how the emojis behave at small sizes and in combination — useful knowledge before you design anything.

Practical points to keep in mind

• Licensing is reciprocal in effect. Everything is free to use under CC BY-SA 4.0. If you contribute, your work becomes part of that openly licensed collection, so be comfortable with that before submitting.
• Consistency beats novelty. A technically correct but stylistically different emoji is less useful to the project than one that blends into the existing set.
• The project is active. The presence of Emoji v17.0 and a count of 4,495 emojis indicates ongoing maintenance, so contributions are being folded into a living set rather than a frozen archive.
• Expect iteration. The "many iterations" language is a fair warning that a first draft is a starting point, not a finished submission.

If your goal is simply to use the emojis, no participation is needed — they are free to use. If your goal is to shape the set, begin with the collection, then go through Participate & Contribute with work that respects the style guide and the Unicode standard.