Have you ever thought on where emojis came from? In the modern chatting world, emojis play an important role in the expression of various emotions. It made everything simple. They are of many looks: a smiling face, animals, GIFs and many other image-based characters. With the consideration of the importance of emojis in our day to day life, every year seventeenth of July is planned to be celebrated as world emoji day.
The first emoji was made in 1999 by a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita. At that time he was working as part of team “i-mode” which was a mobile internet platform in the development phase of Docomo, one of the leading mobile carriers of the country. He was actually looking to design an attractive interface which could convey a particular kind of information in a simple as well as precise manner. Keeping that in mind he sketched a set of 12*12 pixel images which can be configured with a keyboard-like grid from within the i-mode interface of DOCOMO. These characters were designed in a way that they could be sent through mobiles as well as pagers as individual characters.
With an inspiration to that, the Japanese artist created around 176 Emoji which is called as Original emojis that are now part of the permanent collection of the New York’s Museum of modern art. This finding becomes so remarkable in Japanese technology world as a new form that can be used and shared for expressing something in a more simple way. The 176 original emojis included characters showing the weather with symbols of sun, clouds, umbrella and a snowman, characters showing traffic with symbols of car, tram, airplane, and ship), characters showing technology with symbols of landline, cell phone, TV and GameBoy as well as all the phases of the Earth’s moon.
This marked the beginning of an era of visual language in modern communication and became more popular from 2012.