In 1999, a Japanese designer named Shigetaka Kurita sat down with a 12×12 pixel grid and drew 144 tiny pictures. Each one was smaller than a postage stamp on a computer screen, built from fewer than 50 distinct colored pixels. Nobody planned for them to reshape human language, but twenty-five years later, the smiley face Kurita squeezed into that grid is more universal than English.
The short answer
Emojis were created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a designer at Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo. He designed the first set of 144 emojis for their i-mode network. They spread globally starting in 2008 when Apple’s iPhone added emoji support, and by 2015, standardized emoji had become central to how billions of people communicate online.
The problem emoticons couldn’t solve
Before emojis, we had emoticons—those sideways faces made from keyboard characters. The smiley :) appeared in 1982 when Carnegie Mellon professor Scott Fahlman posted it to a message board as a way to mark jokes in text. For twenty years, emoticons were enough. If you wanted to soften a message or signal tone, you typed a colon and a parenthesis.
But emoticons had a fundamental limitation: they required specific keyboard gymnastics. In English, :) is intuitive because those characters sit next to each other. In Japanese text entry—where you’re switching between kanji, hiragana, and katakana on a flip-phone keypad—there was no standard gesture for a smiley. You couldn’t just type :) and expect it to feel natural. The characters didn’t flow.
More importantly, emoticons were still text. They relied on the reader mentally rotating the characters and recognizing the pattern. A picture doesn’t require that translation. It just is.
How emojis were created: Kurita’s 144-pixel grid
Shigetaka Kurita wasn’t trying to invent a universal language. He was trying to make NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode service stickier. I-mode was a mobile data network—think of it as a walled-garden internet for flip phones. Users could check weather, news, and email. But the experience was text-heavy and dry. Kurita’s job was to make messaging feel more human.
His constraint was brutal: 12×12 pixels. That’s 144 pixels total. For comparison, a single letter in this sentence on your screen is probably 16 pixels tall. Kurita had to fit a heart, a sun, a telephone, a calendar, and a hundred other concepts into spaces smaller than most icons today.
So he went abstract. His “taxi” was a yellow-and-black rectangle. His “love hotel” (a common Japanese business category) was a simple outline with a heart. His faces were dots and lines. The minimalism wasn’t a style choice—it was survival. You can see the original 144 emojis archived at MoMA, where they were exhibited in 2016 as design artifacts.
By 2001, emoji use had exploded across Japanese mobile carriers. But emojis were trapped. Each carrier—NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank, KDDI—had designed its own competing set. If you sent an emoji from one network to another, it either vanished or turned into a random character.
Emoji evolution through Unicode standardization
The fix came from an unexpected place: the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit that maintains the universal text-encoding standard. In the early 2000s, Unicode began adding emoji codepoints, initially drawing from Japanese carriers’ existing sets. A codepoint is like a serial number for a character—it tells every device “this is a smiley” without dictating what the smiley looks like.
By 2010, Unicode made emoji support mandatory. If your device claimed to support Unicode (which basically every modern device does), it had to render emoji. That created a global standard. You could send an emoji from Tokyo to Toronto and both people would see something, even if the designs differed.
This is the interesting wrinkle: every platform interprets emoji differently. Apple draws its own versions. Google draws its own. Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook—they all design their emojis from scratch. The codepoint U+1F600 means “grinning face,” but what a grinning face looks like is up to the platform. For years, Samsung’s burger emoji 🍔 was upside down (bun, then patty, then bottom bun). Google’s blobby yellow emoji were beloved; when Google replaced them with rounder designs in 2017, people mourned. These aren’t bugs. They’re platforms expressing identity.
The accidental global takeover
Apple’s iPhone shipped in 2007, and by 2008, iOS included emoji support—but only for Japanese users. It was a hidden feature, buried in the Japanese keyboard settings. The thing is, people talk to each other. Japanese users sent emojis. Non-Japanese users saw them. And they wanted them.
By 2011, Apple enabled emoji globally in iOS 5. It wasn’t a strategic export. It was demand-driven. Once emoji escaped the Japanese-keyboard ghetto, adoption exploded. Twitter added native emoji rendering in 2013. Facebook followed. By 2015, researchers were documenting emoji’s explosive growth across social platforms, with usage rates climbing sharply year over year.
The global spread wasn’t inevitable. Emojis could have stayed a Japanese novelty. But the iPhone made them cool, and once a critical mass of people could see them, everyone wanted to send them. Emoji filled a gap emoticons couldn’t: they were immediate, visual, and they worked across languages. A smiley means roughly the same thing in Tokyo, Toronto, and Tehran.
Emoji now: politics and governance
Here’s what most people get wrong: they think emojis just happen. Someone draws a taco, it catches on, and suddenly everyone has a taco emoji. That’s not how it works.
Every emoji you see had to be formally proposed, debated, and voted on by the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. Anyone can submit a proposal—individuals, advocacy groups, corporations—but the bar is high. You need evidence: data showing likely usage, proof the concept isn’t already covered by existing emoji, cultural or demographic significance, and a clear visual representation. The proposal goes through multiple rounds of review. The subcommittee meets quarterly. Most proposals get rejected.
When a proposal makes it through, Unicode assigns it a codepoint and adds it to the official emoji data files. From there, platforms have roughly six months to design and ship their versions before the next OS update cycle. That’s why new emoji don’t appear instantly—they’re waiting for Apple, Google, and Samsung to draw them.
This gets political fast. In 2015, activists pushed for skin tone modifiers, arguing that default yellow emoji erased people of color. Apple and Google initially resisted, citing technical complexity—each new modifier multiplies the number of emoji variants exponentially. The activists won. By Unicode 8.0 in 2015, you could hold down on certain emoji and select from five skin tones based on the Fitzpatrick scale. Gender modifiers followed in 2016. Profession emoji got gendered variants. Family structures diversified.
Each addition required months of negotiation, technical documentation, and platform buy-in. The system is transparent and democratic, but it’s still a system. Adding a “pregnant man” emoji or a “worm” isn’t spontaneous. It’s governance. And that governance reflects power: tech companies have seats at the table. So do linguists and accessibility advocates. The fights over which emojis get added—and which don’t—are fights over whose experiences get validated.
When platforms disagree: the cost of fragmentation
The Unicode standard solved interoperability—your emoji reaches my phone—but it didn’t solve interpretation. Because each platform designs its own emoji artwork, the same codepoint can mean subtly (or drastically) different things depending on where you’re viewing it.
The Samsung burger fiasco is the famous case: for years, Samsung rendered the burger emoji with cheese below the patty and the lettuce on top of the bun. Apple’s version had the cheese on top of the patty, where most people expect it. When people noticed in 2017, it became a minor internet controversy. Samsung eventually fixed it, but the damage was done—people had been sending “let’s get burgers” messages with an emoji that looked wrong to half their recipients.
Google’s blob emoji retirement triggered genuine mourning. The blobs were rounder, friendlier, more expressive than the standard yellow circles most platforms used. When Google replaced them in 2017 to match other platforms, users protested. Some insisted the blobs meant something different—that a blob smiley conveyed warmth in a way the new circular one didn’t. Google didn’t reverse course.
These aren’t just aesthetic quibbles. When a sender chooses an emoji, they’re imagining what the receiver will see. If the receiver sees something different—angrier, sadder, more intense—the message changes. A 2016 study found that people consistently misinterpreted the emotional intensity of emoji when rendered across different platforms. The risk isn’t catastrophic miscommunication, but it’s friction. It’s the digital equivalent of thinking you’re speaking the same language and realizing your dialects diverge.
What it means for how we talk now
Kurita’s 144 pixels became a universal language, but not a neutral one. Unicode now catalogs thousands of standardized emoji, and emoji have become nearly ubiquitous in digital communication. They’re not decorative anymore. They’re load-bearing. An emoji changes tone, clarifies intent, and sometimes replaces words entirely.
But emojis are also curated. They’re designed by committees, rendered differently by corporations, and subject to the same cultural negotiations as any language. The difference is that most languages evolve bottom-up. Emoji evolution is top-down, governed by voting and proposals. It’s a language where you can’t coin a new word—you have to petition for it.
Kurita couldn’t have predicted this. He was solving a problem for Japanese flip-phone users in 1999. But the constraints he worked within—extreme minimalism, visual clarity, emotional immediacy—turned out to be universal. Emoji succeeded because they’re faster than words and clearer than emoticons. They’re a design solution that became a linguistic one.
FAQ
When were emojis invented?
Emojis were invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile network in Japan. The original set included 144 emojis, each designed on a 12×12 pixel grid.
What’s the difference between emojis and emoticons?
Emoticons are keyboard characters arranged to look like faces, like :) or :-D. They originated in the 1980s. Emojis are standalone images—actual pictures, not text. Emojis were created to solve input problems emoticons couldn’t handle, especially in non-English text entry.
Why do emojis look different on different phones?
Each platform (Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft) designs its own emoji artwork. Unicode standardizes what an emoji means (the codepoint), but not what it looks like. This allows platforms to express their design identity, but it also creates the risk of miscommunication when the same emoji conveys different emotional tones across platforms.
How are new emojis added?
Anyone can submit an emoji proposal to the Unicode Consortium, but approval requires evidence: likely usage data, cultural significance, proof the concept isn’t redundant, and a clear design. Proposals go through multiple review rounds before the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee votes. Most are rejected. Approved emoji receive a codepoint and appear in the next Unicode release, then platforms design and ship their versions in subsequent OS updates.
Emojis aren’t magic. They’re the result of a Japanese designer working within absurd constraints, a standards body doing thankless governance work, and billions of people deciding that pictures say things words can’t. If you want to see how design becomes language, start with Kurita’s grid.