Wanru LIU

Dissertation

A4

Supervisor：Dr.Xiaowei HUANG

In China, there is an increasing recognition of the significance of developing Chinese traditional culture. WeChat, as a versatile communication platform, has gained popularity worldwide. Given the widespread use of WeChat and the crucial role of emojis in communication, traditional cultural emojis could take the advantages of social network emojis to promote their development. However, traditional cultural emojis are still lacking in design methodology, resulting in uneven design and quality, which is important to the inheritance and promotion of traditional Chinese culture. To solve this problem, this study seeks to investigate effective principles of emoji design by exploring users' preferences and functional needs for emoji design, and by applying content analysis to identify strong memes in popular WeChat emojis from the perspective of memetics.