The History and Evolution of Emojis From Pagers to Unicode
Emojis started as a pager feature in 1999 and grew into a global communication system. Here is how we got here. The emoji as we know it began in 1999 when Shigetaka Kurita, working for the Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo, designed a set of 176 twelve-by-twelve pixel symbols for the i-mode pager platform. The original set was limited by hardware constraints. Each glyph had to fit into a tiny grid and still be recognizable, which is why the early emojis were so abstract. Kurita drew inspiration from manga iconography, weather symbols, and Chinese characters, and the result was a vocabulary that could express emotion, weather, food, and common objects in a few pixels. I saw the original 176 emojis exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016. Standing in front of them, I was struck by how much communication they achieved with so few pixels. The grinning face was a circle with two dots and a curve. The heart was a simple shape. The umbrella was recognizable but barely. These were not the polished, full-color emojis we have today. They were primitive, functional, and surprisingly expressive. From Carrier Exclusives to Unicode For the first decade, emojis were a Japanese carrier feature. Each carrier, DoCoMo, KDDI, and SoftBank, had its own set, and messages sent between carriers often showed the wrong symbol or no symbol at all. Read the full article on Emoji Reference, and copy any emoji mentioned from the catalog of 1303+ entries on the home page.