Star Trek is a popular film franchise, well in North America, and Facebook decided to bring back the nostalgia by celebrating it in the nerdiest way possible.
As explained by Lindsey Shepard who is the Marketing Lead at Messenger on Facebook, this was quite an endeavour which involved coming up with the profile frame and custom reaction emojis.
In the case of the profile frame, their internal design team had to create the infamous USS Enterprise spacecraft by hand and photographed it so as to create that greeting that you can make into a profile frame.
They even went a step further where they wanted to celebrate Star Trek’s golden jubilee with their Reactions feature. If you remember, reactions are the several embedded emoji that are launched from the like button that were intended to show a specific emotion to a post. Facebook decided to use the “most iconic and recognizable characters and symbols from the original Star Trek series.” This include the Vulcan salute signal which replaced the “love” button, Spock as the Wow button and Kirk (Haha), Geordi (Sad) and a Klingon (Angry) character filled the rest.
This is not the first time Facebook has tried coming up with custom emojis that are presented on the Reaction emoji panel. On May, the company included a “Thankful” flower emoji that you were to use in celebrating Mother’s day. Although that was only one addition to the emoji panel, this is the first time we are seeing the company coming up with a fully custom emoji panel that is completely based on the standard issue. Sadly, this will be only available in US and Canada to a limited number of people.
I loved the Trek emojis but they dissappeared in less than a day!