Auburn fans across the country are expressing their spirit in a new fashion this football season.
According to Jon Sirico, assistant athletics director of marketing and sales in auburn athletics, there were more than 45,000 downloads of the newest Auburn app, Auburn Emoji, the first week it was launched.
Auburn Emoji is a keyboard app that is available for iPhone or Android smartphones.
It was launched Friday, Sept. 4, and Sirico said 385,000 images were used in the first week.
Sirico said after Auburn Emojis is downloaded and installed on a smartphone, the app imports emojis, stickers and GIFs into the phone’s messaging platforms.
The app was created by a third party called Snaps, according to Sirico, and the artwork was created by athletics.
Morgan Smith, senior in graphic design, has worked as a graphic designer in the marketing department of Auburn athletics since January 2015.
She said Sirico came to graphic design and told them he needed 18 emojis, which would fill a page on the messaging board.
“It was kind of his baby to begin with,” Smith said. “He got the ball rolling on it.”
Smith said at first the designers were going to split up the emojis and collaborate, but then she said she would do the whole project.
“It was really important to me for all of them to really look consistent,” Smith said. “Once I started just started rolling with them, more and more ideas came.”
She said there were only supposed to be 18 emojis at first, but she ended up making 48, which she designed in one week.
“The process happened fast, really,” Smith said. “Once I got kind of got a consistent look to a couple of them, I was able to just knock out the rest of them ... They turned out really nice I think.”
Sirico said the app is easy to use.
“One of the things we talked about is the way we want to help people communicate the way they want to communicate,” Sirico said. “There’s a lot of data that shows how people communicate, emojis, text and shorter forms of communication are the things that people do these days, and so, we feel like this is really, kind of like a perfect, way to help those folks, the millennial generation that wants to communicate.”
Sirico said they have been thinking about how to use emojis for a while, and the Atlanta Hawks were one of the first teams to have a custom keyboard.
“In the industry, we saw something that worked and we thought we could do that and our fans are early to adopt in technology and we knew this would be a big hit,” Sirico said.
Smith said she designed all of the emojis, but she said stickers primarily started with cutouts of photos, such as Coach Gus Malzahn’s head.
However, she starting with the Jacksonville State game she created game day buttons for each game, which appear in the stickers section of the keyboard.
She also said they just updated the app with vintage Auburn logos stickers.
Smith said the GIFs were created by the social media department of athletics.
Sirico said when collecting data for the app, they found 800 billion messages were sent a day globally through messaging applications, and it will triple to 100 trillion by 2019.
He also said Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Canada and Germany, along with 11 other countries have downloaded Auburn Emojis.
“We wanted to make sure that we are providing our fans an opportunity to embrace our brand in their communication,” Sirico said. “We definitely think it’s going to continue to grow in terms how people communicate and utilize in this kind of technology ... continue to roll out new creative ideas that are going to want people to continue to use it.”
Kasey Langley, who graduated in August in media studies, said she heard about the app this summer.
She said her friends communicate mostly through Auburn emojis now.
“It’s definitely a way to keep those memories alive, even in something as little as a press of a button,” Langley said.
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