How many times a day do you send an emoji? A smiling face, a heart, fire, a waving hand... Most of us first saw them on a smartphone keyboard and assumed emoji came from there. But emoji is not the invention of Apple or Silicon Valley. Its roots go back to 1990s Japan and to mobile phones with tiny screens.
1999: 176 small pictures for i-mode
In 1999 the Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo was preparing i-mode, a service that let phones connect to the internet. Shigetaka Kurita (born 1972), a young designer at the company, designed a set of 176 pictograms for the service. Each was drawn on a grid of just 12×12 pixels.
Fitting an emotion or an object into such a tiny space was a serious design problem: 144 pixels in total for each symbol. According to MoMA, Kurita drew inspiration from manga, the Zapf Dingbats typeface and emoticons. Wikipedia also lists weather symbols, Chinese characters and traffic signs among the sources of inspiration. The set included weather symbols, pictograms such as a heart, and facial expressions.
Next to today's emoji, Kurita's drawings look almost abstract. But making a heart, a sun or a smiling face recognizable with a few dozen pixels was real craftsmanship given the screen limits of the time.
The goal was to add tone and emotion to short messages and mobile email. Think of the difference between saying "okay" in plain text and putting a smiling face next to it.
Pixels that made it into a museum
In 2016 Kurita's set entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In MoMA's records the work appears as "Emoji, 1998-1999", a gift of NTT Docomo. The museum notes that today's emoji are descendants of this original set, and it also presented the set to visitors in an exhibition called "Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita". That phone symbols a few pixels in size have entered one of the world's best-known modern art museums is a reminder that design lives not only on large canvases but on the smallest screens too.
So is the "first" emoji really Kurita's?
For many years it was told that way. But the emoji archive Emojipedia changed this record with a correction titled "Correcting the Record". According to Emojipedia, SoftBank, then known as J-Phone, offered a set of 90 emoji on the SkyWalker DP-211SW phone released on November 1, 1997. According to Wikipedia, this monochrome, 12×12-pixel set covered numbers, sports, the clock, moon phases and weather. Its designers are unknown. Because the phone didn't sell well and the set wasn't supported on other devices, these emoji didn't reach a wide audience.
That's why in the video we were careful instead of saying "Kurita is the inventor of emoji": Kurita's set is not the first, but it is the set that popularized emoji and is regarded as the ancestor of today's emoji. Emojipedia also reminds us that Docomo added a heart symbol to pagers in 1995, which could count as an early emoji.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| 1997: SoftBank, 90 emoji | Unicode 17.0: 3,953 emoji |
| 1999: Docomo, 176 emoji, 12×12 pixels | High-resolution, colorful artwork |
| Only Japanese phones | Every platform in the world |
When did Apple come in?
Apple's role in the emoji story was not inventing emoji but carrying them to the world. According to Wikipedia, the emoji keyboard on iPhone was first offered in 2008, with iPhone OS 2.2, in Japan only. In October 2010 Unicode 6.0 standardized 722 emoji, so that different devices could recognize the same emoji in the same way. Apple opened the emoji keyboard to users outside Japan in 2011 with iOS 5.
Today's emoji list is far from Kurita's 176 squares. According to Wikipedia, Unicode 17.0 defines a total of 3,953 emoji using 1,438 characters. The gap comes from the fact that many emoji are not a single character but a combination of several; skin tone options and family emoji are built this way.
So the chain goes like this: Japanese operators invented emoji, Unicode turned it into a universal language, and smartphones carried it into everyone's pocket.
What do you think emoji express today that we can't put into writing?