Creatives around the world will be looking enviously at Matt Jones, a designer whose brief is to redesign the 'smiley face' seen in billions of messages sent every day across the world's favourite social network.

With the complexity and diversity of these countless messages and inferences typed every second, Facebook have taken a bold step with such a creative hire. Jones' job will be to revolutionise a staple of online messaging that has been popularised since the dot-com boom of the early 2000s, when instant messaging and email first took off.  His experiences with Monsters University and Wallace and Gromit will serve him well when translating emotional designs, which will be more detailed and intuitive than any service has ever attempted.


"Facebook was canny enough to realize that traditional emoticons are quite bland," says Jones. "At Pixar we consider emotional states every day with every drawing we make. Our work is informed by the years of study we do, constantly studying people's gestures and expressions in real life."

"If we can crack a universal language, that will be true success," says Jones. "What we need to aim at is instant readability, just like what we do in cartoons."

This unusual hire shows that digital leaders (such as Apple, with great success) are forging closer relationships with creative design industries to establish a human-centric connection to a technical service.