All About My Emoticons

The story so far...

Three years ago we gave up our nice office jobs and started creating emoticons. Today we're obsessed with creating emoticons. We were the first people to provide custom emoticons for MSN Messenger. Our emoticons are completely free...that's free from any payment to use them and free from that annoying adware and spyware that takes over computers and makes us really irritable.

Why didn't we call ourselves 'My Smileys'? In the beginning the emoticon market was just emerging and we were based in Europe where we only ever heard the word 'emoticons' so we chose that. Read more about our views on the debate here.

We like change so we don't have an office. We're a global team - some of us are in London, some Australia, some India. We've even run the business from Mexico. What's best is that our friends from around the world inspire us with new ideas all the time. A global family of emoticon addicts.

Why did we do it?

The idea behind My Emoticons was to help ourselves express emotions when we're chatting online without face to face communication. It can be hard to get the message across. We're all experienced a few embarrassing situations because of it. There were a few messenger emoticons out there but they didn't do it for us. So we decided to start making our own. We like showing our emotions and our loony animated emoticons make our friends laugh - a lot.

It sounds a bit 'goody two shoes' but we consider ourselves fortunate to lead the lives we do. For that we reason we want to help others too. So we make our emoticons free so everyone out there has an opportunity to join in and express emotion.

We like fun to be simple. If our emoticon experience isn't just that - let us know. You'll see that all your online buddies can see our emoticons when you chat, there's no complicated software installation involved. We also test our emoticons with our friends before we let you see the finished product. If it's not good enough for us (and we have high standards), it's not good enough for you.

Our designs

We don't believe in stealing images from other sites. We were lucky to find a fabulously funky designer after lots of searching who helped us create emoticons that are refreshingly innovative and of a high graphical quality. We love the style - there's always a little twist to make it slightly quirky. The animated emoticons are our best yet. That said we always want to improve. We're interested to know more about what you think and love it when you get involved. Let us know any ideas so contact us and let us know what you think.

Our mantra

Work smart, not hard. That's our mantra. That doesn't mean we don't do lots of work, it just means we keep focused and make sure we have fun. That includes taking regular 'energy boost' breaks. During an energy boost break we get out - walk somewhere, get a drink (usually coffee), maybe a snack and chat (usually about work!). It works wonders. There's something about office based jobs that makes taking energy boost breaks hard work.

Finally, we don't drop litter and we recycle the waste we create. Make sure you do the same. Being a litter bug is bad. And one more thing, we try to buy second hand books to save trees.