‘Fail Whale’ Designer Yiying Lu Explains How She Designed and Certified the Official Dumpling Emoji

Yiying Lu, the talented designer behind the famous piece “Lifting A Dreamer” aka “Twitter Fail Whale”, who was just named one of the Most Creative People in Business 2018 and is a very good friend of Laughing Squid, gave an amusing talk to a San Francisco Ignite audience about how she went about creating the official dumpling emoji. The affable designer spoke about how she got the idea for the emoji, the process by which she needed to get the emoji officially certified through The Unicode Consortium, the hiccups she encountered along the way and the release of the final design.

How could there not be a dumpling emoji? After learning that this much-loved food did not have an emoji, Yiying Lu decided to create one and ask Unicode Consortium for their blessing in making the emoji official. She takes us on a journey through how much thought goes into the creation of an image, detailing how international contributions impacted the final emoji set that she created.

Lori Dorn
Lori Dorn

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry, playing guitar, taking photos and mixing craft cocktails.

Recent Posts