Its been a while since I last post something graphic related. Therefore, allow me to abandon all my rants and concentrate on graphics for a few minutes. I’ve been longing for a nice emoticons set since the default ones in WordPress are pretty boring and generic. I can download other emoticons designed by other designers but most of them are either too boring or too cute for my taste. After a bit of inspiration, I decided to play around with Illustrator and design it myself. Here is what I had come up with:
I am happy with the way it turns out to be but I have to say that this is not my original idea. I have to give credit to the original designer who came up with this beautiful idea. I am inspired by Kyee. You can view the original idea here on his Dribbble account. I really like his idea because it is simple and clean. It gives his emoticons a lot of personality and it looks interesting. Therefore, I decided to create my own take based on his concepts. I still think that his take is so much better than mine. However, I am happy with my own rendition of his idea. I don’t think so there are any difference between my design and his except for the my ‘angry’ and smiling (orange) emoticons. I had also added a few extra ones; the winking, the ‘stick-out-my-tongue-at-you’ smilies and the white one. It is hard to make my emoticons look different since there is not much to play around with when it comes designing a small piece like emoticons. I guess I can make mine unique by playing around with the facial expressions just like how I did with my ‘angry’ emoticon.
This is not the full set of emoticons and it is not the final design. I am going to play around with the facial expressions and I am planning to expand the set since I want to replace all my WordPress default emoticons. Just expect some wild designs in the full set later on since I will be checking out the WordPress smiley page in order to expand the set. Lots of emoticons to design and I can just go wild with the facial expressions!
I am planning to keep the noise texture on each of the emoticons. I am not sure why but I am loving the noise texture that I had created. I am obsessed with noise texture. What do you think about my new emoticons? Should I keep the noise texture or let it go? Give out some of your ideas if you must. Of course, I am going to resize these and make it smaller and if you guys are lucky, I might release it for downloads. 
<— The reason why I need a new set of emoticons.
How abt nose bleed as well as blush emoticons. Also emoticons with a drop of sweat on the side of emoticon’s head. There r lots of room to play around with.
Oh man! Cute emotions! That have tongues sticking out! My life is complete!
I think that I’ll use them once you’re done. I don’t like the fact that the default WordPress : P doesn’t have a tongue sticking out.
I like how the colour of each emotion represents its personality i.e. the darker the colour the darker the aura being presented. Eg red represents anger.
I also like the noise texture, it is a big improvement over kyee’s. Sincerely hope the emoticons are not re-sized too small so the texture can still be noticed and appreciated.
Look forward to a full set release this summer
I hate the default smilies myself. Especially
. Is it me or is it super pedo-like? I’ve been looking for smilies for ages but have found no luck finding any. Eventually, I decided to just remove them entirely since my comments page looks cleaner without smilies all over the place.
Your set looks awesome though! I would actually consider using them. They’re very clean and simple. Plus I like how it’s a variety of colors. Most smilie sets, I’ve noticed, only stick with one color. Very boring and bland.
I want to make more Dante icons too. xD But I have no bases. D: Hard to find images, and I’m not a fan of using fan-art. (And the new Dante concepts are… meh. P: ) And banner!Ichigo rocks, right? xD I have hair envy… haha. And wahey~ =D (Also a little jealous. I’ve 9-11 weeks before I finish for summer).
I love your emoticons and think they do have their own little personality aside from the base emoticons you were inspired by. I don’t know why..but I always wanted a bubblegum blowing emoticon. *shrugs* Just a thought Lol. I know one thing.. iphone needs a middle finger emoticon…Sometimes text messages get real serious. XD
wow nice set of smilies :3 hmm with noise it will diffidently match the current theme you have right now! So I think you should keep one set that’s noise and one set that isnt just in case you change your theme that might match the set without the noise ^^
Hmm the emoticons look very cool! Better than the default yellow smileys. But the brown one and the white one are too similar, emotionally I think. I guess the brown one is sympathetic and white one is neutral? lol
That is really weird. The white one is neutral. More specifically, it represents the emoticon that looks like this
while the brown one represents the emoticon that looks like this :/. I am not sure whether the latter represents sympathy or not. 
It’s been a while and it’s nice to be finally back blogging. I really love the new look in your blog, especially the texture!
Those are really cute emoticons!