Creating the Boom 💥 Emoji. From shipping a feature to winning a…
By: Chad Arimura
Tags: Hipchat, Slack, Boom, Emoji

From shipping a feature to winning a new customer to finding out you’re having a girl, the boom 💥 emoji has become lingua franca to concisely express one’s emotions. A few weeks ago I received an email from a former investor:

"Did I make the BOOM icon in Slack? (Indirectly through you?) Would you blog that shit so I can tell the story over pints and not be called a lying a-hole."

The answer to his question is yes. At least I think. So. Here’s his blog post.

We created the original boom 💥 emoji in 2012

The investor who sent the email above happened to be our first Iron.io investor in 2010, and following our progress whenever something exciting would happen he’d respond with “boom!”. This became common speak in our company, even across multiple countries and languages.

When we started using Hipchat in 2011, we had to settle for simply using the English word, but then I found they’d make a custom emoji for your company when referring a customer. This might seem very uneventful now, but in 2011, a custom emoji was a big deal.

So on January 3rd, a buddy of mine sent the following email to Pete Curley’s (founder of Hipchat) automated feedback request email:

Date: January 3, 2012

From: Brian Glynn

To: Pete Curley "Great! Nice service. Unless something changes we'll definitely be continuing with the service. On a related note, I'm hanging out with my buddy Chad Arimura cofounder of Iron.io. I didn't give him proper referral credit when signing up, and he's eager for his custom emoticon. Can you retroactively hook him up?"

And after a few iterations with our longtime designer, Andy Burkovetsky, we came up with a pretty sweet animation sequence:

(Thanks to Luke Stephen Rehmann for the explosion of our explosion in comments)

and sent the following email:

Date: February 10, 2012

From: Chad Arimura

To: Pete Curley Pete! Here's the first generation of our new HipChat icon. We'd love to rev it down the road when we have more time. Feel free to snake it for your own uses if you like it. We think it's sorely needed to express our emotions when someone does something awesome. (boom) Chad

And his response:

Date: February 11, 2012

From: Pete Curley

To: Chad Arimura Just put it in. It'll take a few hours for it to show up for everyone on your team. Boom.

---

Pete Curley

Co-Founder, HipChat.com

And lo and behold, the fruits of our labor:

Going Global

A month later, I was hanging out in the Atlassian office (they were partners of ours at Iron.io) and I think it was Garret (or maybe Pete) walked in and I was excited to show them the sweet sweet emoji and recommended they make it global. Again, this was a big deal back then.

Shortly after that, we noticed that they agreed and made the emoji global. I was bummed they didn’t let me know, but they had just gotten acquired so they were busy doing acquiree things.

And shortly after that, Slack dominated the scene, and :boom: 💥 (animation and all at the time) became a global option, obviously inspired by Hipchat’s global emoji set.

So that’s the story.

We probably can’t take full credit. In doing 3 minutes of research for this blog post, I realize now that :collision: was part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010, but this certainly was nowhere on our radar, and certainly no option in Hipchat. Standard Unicode Emoji 1.0 didn’t arrive until 2015. “Boom” isn’t on the list, but it’s global in Slack and predictive in iOS as well.