18F emoji for the world to have
_{13 April 2025}

One of the things that made 18F special was our joyfulness. We recognized the humanity of our work and of each other, and we valued that. We leaned on each other for support both professionally and personally, and we set out to have fun together while delivering high-quality digital services to the American people.

Our partners recognized that in us as well. Our joy and our fun were infectious. We soon made friends at our partner agencies, and they regularly remarked on not just how professional and competent we were, but also how much fun we were.

One of the tools we used to share our joy was with our custom Slack emoji. Over our 11 years, we curated quite a collection of over 7000 emoji. These tiny pictures let us express ourselves quickly and effectively, too. :facepalm: says, “Oops, I messed up.” :battery-low: says, "I'm tired or struggling today.” :ish: means “That's kinda right, but also kinda wrong."

Anyway, the original 18f.org website was a display of all the custom emoji created by 18F over the years (minus the ones of colleagues' faces and pets, for privacy reasons). When our office was unceremoniously abolished and staff placed on admin leave, we decided to repurpose the site for good cause – it now hosts archives of our guides (which are :chef-kiss: fantastic) and our blogs.

But today, I put our emoji site back online. You can find it at https://emoji.18f.org.

(This site also displays our collection of giraffe facts, but that’s a topic for a whole other post.)

Yeah, this is silly. But 18F were the biggest goobers in government, and that's no contradiction to also being "the gold standard" of technologists, as our political leadership called us just days before shuttering our office. In fact, being goobers made us better technologists. The fun and joy improved our team relationships and helped us manage the unrelenting stress of public service. I am proud of my time as a government goober, and I'm glad that we open sourced everything so that it can continue to live on even after the joyless ketamine klowns tried to take us down.