Kurita has said that his work took inspiration from sources such as weather symbols and street signs, as well as the obvious: the pictographic characters in the Japanese script kanji, adopted from Chinese characters which were first developed as early as the 2nd millennium BCE. The 1999 NTT DOCOMO emoji set were added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016, cementing their place in art and design history. From then on, emoji began to exponentially multiply, with nearly 3,000 today. After much internal debate, the global Unicode Consortium officially incorporated emoji into the international technology standards for digital Communications in 2010, launching with 722 emoji. They won over the public instantly, and were adopted across Japanese mobile phone platforms (often in competition with each other) in the next decade. His initial set of emoji (“e” for picture, “moji” for character) was created with a limited canvas of 12 x 12 pixels per image but managed to cleverly portray low-resolution symbols that remain emoji favorites today such as a heart, a martini glass, and a smiley face.
#Wechat emoji artists full
In 1999, a designer named Shigetaka Kurita created a full color set of 176 emoji for the mobile phone provider NTT DOCOMO and their pioneering “i-mode” software. Though there is some debate over who created the very first official emoji set for mobile phones, the earliest black-and-white set was introduced in 1997 by the team behind the J-Phone (a company that would eventually be acquired by other parent companies including SoftBank). Emoji quickly became a global phenomenon, but their history starts in Japan and connects to a far longer tradition of pictorial language and playful visual symbolism in other mediums. The symbols we use daily in our text messages, emails, and social media posts have become more than just a cute novelty, or a tool for saving time - they help convey nuance, show care, and add a layer of creativity and playfulness to even the simplest messages. Whether as universal as a heart or as specific as a female mountain-biker, emoji have come to play an essential role in our digital language.