Email and SMS
With the everyday adoption of email and text messaging over cellular networks, the need arose to try to humanize that exchange. In a face-to-face conversation, a sentence comes accompanied by gestures, looks, pauses and expressions that let us decode the message and the intentions of the person speaking to us. But on a screen, an “ok” can sound friendly, curt or cold. A joke can come across as aggressive. A short reply can be mistaken for anger. Digital communication was fast and immediate, but it also lacked emotion, gestures or tone, all key signals for correct interpretation.
The Origin of Emoticons
In 1982, Scott Fahlman, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon, proposed using :-) to mark joking messages and :-( for ones that weren't. That's how emoticons were born, tiny gestural faces made from common characters. They weren't images, just plain text. Ridiculous compared to the sea of options we have available today, but at the time they managed to convey the tone of a message in a very simple way.
In Japan, the combination of available characters made it possible to create more expressive forms, like (^_^) or (T_T). These were called kaomoji. Unlike Western emoticons, you didn't have to tilt your head to read them. They were expressive, direct and very close to manga's visual culture.
The big leap came with Japanese mobile phones in the late nineties.
The company NTT DOCOMO was developing i-mode, a mobile internet service. At the time, screens were very small, typing was inconvenient, and a simpler way to communicate information, emotions and actions was needed. Shigetaka Kurita, part of the i-mode team, proposed using small pictograms that condensed gestures and concepts in a more pleasant, efficient way.
That's how, between 1998 and 1999, he designed a set of 176 emoji for NTT DOCOMO. Each one had to fit into a minimal 12-by-12 pixel grid. There were suns, clouds, hearts, trains, phones, faces, signs and everyday objects. That's how emoji were born.
The word emoji comes from Japanese: e means image and moji, character. It doesn't come from “emotion,” even though the coincidence seems perfect.
Kurita's original emojis were small 12-by-12 pixel pictograms. They represented gestures, emotions, weather conditions, modes of transportation, everyday objects and simple symbols meant to communicate faster on the small screens of Japanese mobile phones. In 2016, the original set of 176 NTT DOCOMO emoji was added to the collection of MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Emoji were a total success in Japan, but at first they had a problem: each carrier used its own system. A symbol sent from one phone might not display correctly on another. It could show up as an empty square, change shape, or simply get lost.
That's where the Unicode Consortium came in. As we saw in a previous article, Unicode is the standard that lets digital characters work consistently across devices, languages and operating systems. When emoji were added to Unicode, they stopped depending on a Japanese carrier and became part of a global infrastructure.
Kurita's original emojis are currently on display at → MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In 2010, Unicode added a broad set of emoji based on the Japanese systems. Since then, the same emoji can travel between platforms, even though each company draws it in its own style. That's why a face can look different on Apple, Google, Samsung or Microsoft, while still representing the same character.
Adoption by Apple, Google, Android, social media and messaging apps did the rest. What had started as a solution for small screens became an everyday visual language.
Over time, emoji also began reflecting cultural debates around diversity, skin tones, gender, families, professions, accessibility and representation. Since 2015, for example, skin tone modifiers exist for several human emoji.
Today emoji don't appear at random. The Unicode Consortium evaluates proposals based on concrete criteria. In technical terms, a proposal for a new emoji isn't approved just because an idea seems fun or popular. It has to be submitted to Unicode through a formal application and meet selection factors. These include evaluating whether the emoji would have high expected usage, whether it represents a visually distinguishable idea, whether it works at small sizes, whether it can't be solved with existing emoji, and whether it contributes a concept broad enough to justify encoding it.
The proposal is then reviewed by Unicode's specialized emoji working group. Only a very small share of proposals move forward in the process. If it's finally approved, the emoji is added to the standard and becomes available for different platforms — like Apple, Google, Microsoft or Samsung — to implement with their own visual design.