World Emoji Day is celebrated on July 17, after Jeremy Burge, founder of Emojipedia introduced it in 2014. All emojis are celebrated on this day, while new products and releases are also announced. While emojis have become an indispensable part of our conversation now, modern-day emojis have a rich history going back to the 1990s, when people typed out “;)” or “:)” to express emotions. Then, in 1999 designer Shigetaka Kurita created emojis for the Japanese company NTT Docomo. This came to be known as the first emoji library.
Emojis were made using Japanese graphic novels and Zapf Dingbats typeface, along with pictograms and illustrations. Initially, a set of 176 emojis made up the library. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired it.
Paul Galloway, architecture and design collection specialist for MoMA said at the time, that these are “humble masterpieces of design planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language”, as per It’s Nice That magazine.
Galloway added, “Filling in for body language, emoticons, kaomoji (faces made with grammatical symbols) and emoji reassert the human in the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication.”
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MoMa, on its site, says of emojis “Emoji, when combined with text, allow for more nuanced intonation. Filling in for body language, they reassert the human within the deeply impersonal, abstract space of electronic communication.”
The museum realizes that with the advent of email in the 1970s, messaging drastically moved to mobile devices. As a result, people have lesser time to get their message across and “conveyance of tone and emotion became both more difficult and more urgent”, as per MoMa.
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The prestigious Manhattan art museum adding the piece also speaks volumes about the importance of emojis in contemporary culture. At present, there are over 3,000 emojis used and more are expected in 2022.
