Codemoji: A simple and fun tool to learn about ciphers

And collage of various yellow emoji faces smiling, laughing, and crying set over a blue background.

History

Codemoji was part of the early 2016 Mozilla Foundation Encrypt campaign. Encrypt was a series of videos—along with Codemoji—that explored the importance of encryption. It was ideated and developed by the TODO design studio.

Branding and content from the 2016 Mozilla Encrypt campaign.

A social share from the 2016 Mozilla Encrypt campaign.

What was Codemoji?

Codemoji was a web-based platform that allowed people to send a short message to friends that was then ciphered into emojis. Once the message was sent, the sender would send the receiver a small hint in order for them to decode the emoji scrambled message. The project was intended to demonstrate in a simple and fun way how encryption works on the web.

A screenshot of Mozilla's Codemoji on desktop with instructional text that reads "Pick an emoji and Codemoji will use it in a unique formula to scramble your message."

A screenshot of Mozilla's Codemoji platform on desktop with the "Your message" written section on the left, an overview of all the emoji choices for the cipher in the middle, and the scrambled message on the right.

A screenshot of Mozilla's Codemoji on desktop that reads "Share this message" with the ciphered message scrambled in emoji below.

Credits

Codemoji is a Mozilla Foundation project ideated and developed by TODO in support of the Encrypt campaign launched in early 2016.

A special thanks to Twitter for their twemoji library, which provided us with the widest set of cross-platform emojis we could use in building this project.

The following open-source libraries were also used in developing the website:
bowser, clipboard, cookie, esrever, fastclick, fromcodepoint, gsap, jquery, jquery.transit , lodash, nanoscroller, normalize-css, punycode, rebound-js, stateman, theater, twemoji, youarei.