Emoji ( Japanese: [emodʑi]) are ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. Originating on Japanese mobile phones in 1997, emoji became increasingly popular worldwide in the 2010s after being added to several mobile operating systems. They are now considered to be a large part of popular culture. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named the Face with Tears of Joy emoji (😂) the Word of the Year.
The First Emoji
In the beginning, there were emoticons. For the most part, these came of age as the :-) and :-( and 8-D of chatroom conversations in the 1990s. These primitive gestures represented an important part of early netspeak: You could convey sarcasm by tacking on ;-) at the end of your message or share your ambivalence with the ¯_(ツ)_/¯ face. The first emoji was created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita worked on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. Kurita wanted to design an attractive interface to convey information in a simple, succinct way: for example, an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” So Kurita sketched a set of 12- by 12-pixel images that could be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the i-mode interface, then sent on mobiles and pages as their own individual characters.
In the 2000s, Apple saw an opportunity to incorporate emoji on other platforms. In 2007, a software internationalization team at Google decided to lead the charge, petitioning to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit group that works sort of like the United Nations to maintain text standards across computers. Unicode accepted that proposal in 2010, in a move that would soon make emoji accessible everywhere.
In 2015, Unicode took its first big step toward diversifying emoji by introducing the option to change the skin tone on people emoji, along with additions to include more types of people doing more types of things. Since then, every update has included incremental steps toward diversifying the types of people and cultures represented on the emoji keyboard: female surfers and cyclists, women with hard hats and stethoscopes, people wearing turbans and hijabs. Most recently, Unicode has taken steps toward creating gender-neutral emoji, emoji that represent people with disabilities, and other symbols to represent the full spectrum of emoji users.
"The more we use 😂, the less we use LOL and OMG."
How To Create Your Own Emoji On iPhone
Emojily is by far the best way to create your own emoji on an iPhone. It has a make-from-scratch option and a random method to generate emoji quickly. It’s great for creating emoji of your emotions. When you use the New option from the app’s home screen, you get several creation tools. From left to right, this is the order in which you make your emoji:
Pick a template, like a multi-coloured base, a square face, or a taco head.
-Choose a pair of eyes.
-Decide on some eyebrows.
-Flip through the mouth options to find a suitable one.
-Add some facial hair if you want.
-Optionally pick some hand gestures.
-Select one of the objects to have your emoji stand out.
-Choose a hat for your emoji.
Every option is customizable, so you can drag them around the emoji background, rotate them, and resize them using normal finger gestures. Tap the download button when you’re finished to save your custom emoji to your gallery.
Exit Emojily and go to Settings > General > Keyboards > Keyboards > Add New Keyboard > Emojily to add the Emojily keyboard to your phone and make sending your custom emoji really easy.
The father of the emoji, Kurita, still works in the tech industry as part of the online services of Namco Bandai games. No one could predict that emojis would take off as they did in only a relatively short time, not even Kurita. However, it’s perhaps the innate, human connection of these emojis that transcends mere cultures that explains why the emoji has done so well. As Kurita says in reference to the implied messages behind some emojis:
“I used to think that was true just in Japan. But it’s the same everywhere, that’s nice to know.” he said
What’s nice to know, too is that the world will continue to get new, unique emoji characters with every OS update across all devices and platforms.
