Turn an image into a mosaic made of emojis.

Live site

What is the source for the Emoji character? Using the actual system character seems exceedingly hard — I don't think I got node-canvas installed correctly, and even so I don't believe it would render the Apple Emoji system font.

Maybe extract emoji characters from another library? Gemoji did it The Apple ttf library might be unlicensed?

Get a package to read pngs and make a lookup table?

Use a prebaked lookup table like in emojicam?

The Emoji should be tightly packed, laid on top of each other, and skewed angle to give it an organic vibe. To get an organic layout (rather than a grid layout) Poisson-Disc sampling is cool, here's a great example.