Facebook is beginning to roll out an animated sticker pack designed by illustrator Matt Jones, an artist at Pixar who Facebook is independently working with. Facebook has been trying to take emoticons a step further by super-sizing them in shape, style, and substance with its new Stickers packs, which are currently available on Facebook for iOS and Messenger for Android. This new set, named Finch, is meant to better represent the breadth of human emotions that emoticons so crudely depict. Facebook contacted Jones to work on the project and had him team up with UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner to nail down the nuance of human emotions.
Pixar artist’s Facebook sticker pack now rolling out to users
is The Verge’s executive editor. He has covered tech, policy, and online creators for over a decade.
The stickers are certainly expressive, but their buggy eyes may elicit a different emotion from you than Facebook is expecting. But what Jones created isn’t simply a set of exaggerated emoticons — it’s the result of a template that Facebook had him design, which other sticker creators can base their work off of. If Stickers catches on, we could end up seeing these Jones-designed facial expressions popping up again and again across the social network. The feature’s not available on all platforms yet, however, but Facebook tells us that Stickers will soon be expanding to Messenger for iOS and Facebook for Android as well.
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