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The original set of 176 emojis, acquired by MoMA.
The original set of 176 emojis, acquired by MoMA. Photograph: Shigetaka Kurita/AP
The original set of 176 emojis, acquired by MoMA. Photograph: Shigetaka Kurita/AP

The inventor of emoji on his famous creations – and his all-time favorite

This article is more than 7 years old
As told to

MoMA in New York has just added the first emoji to their collection – Shigetaka Kurita explains how he designed them, and how it all started with the heart

I was part of a team that spent about two years designing the first emoji for the launch of i-mode [NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet system] in 1999. It limited users to up to 250 characters in an email, so we thought emoji would be a quick and easy way for them to communicate. Plus using only words in such a short message could lead to misunderstandings … It’s difficult to express yourself properly in so few characters.

In the mid-1990s, before mobile phones, we used to have pagers in Japan called Pocket Bells. They were cheap and really popular among young people, partly because they had a heart symbol. Then a new version of the Pocket Bell came out that was intended more for business use, and the heart symbol was dropped. It caused an outcry, to the extent that young users left DoCoMo and signed up with another Pocket Bell company that had retained the symbol. That’s when I knew that symbols absolutely had to be part of any texting service. That was my main inspiration.

As for the emoji themselves, I drew inspiration from marks used in weather forecasts and from kanji characters. At first there were about 200 emoji, for things like the weather, food and drink, and moods and feelings. I designed the “heart” symbol for love. Now there are well over 1,000 Unicode emoji.

The original emoji were black and white and confined to 12 by 12 pixels, so they were very simple and there wasn’t much variation. We couldn’t just design what we liked because we were working under those technical constraints. The first colour emoji appeared in 1999, when other mobile carriers in Japan started designing their own versions, like the yellow faces you see today.

At first we were just designing for the Japanese market. I didn’t assume that emoji would spread and become so popular internationally. I’m surprised at how widespread they have become. Then again, they are universal, so they are useful communication tools that transcend language.

Shigetaka Kurita, the inventor of emojis. Photograph: -

Most people don’t know my face, of course, but when I’m introduced overseas as the man who invented emoji, people seem really taken aback. I’m happy about that, but at the same time it feels odd as my emoji days were well over 10 years ago and it’s not something I think about much now. I never introduce myself as the man behind emoji, though.

I think the next step for emoji will be more localisation. There are already lots of symbols that are specific to Japanese culture and society, and I expect the same to happen in other countries. They’ve been around for more than 15 years in Japan and are just a part of life that people think of as a natural part of sending a text message.

The introduction of the iPhone, whose users all have access to the same stock of emoji, has definitely been a great help. If they had continued to develop differently depending on the device, then I don’t think they would have become as ubiquitous.

In technical terms I don’t think we will see any dramatic changes to emoji. Symbols that move or make sounds have been around for quite a while, and then you have stickers for the Line texting app, although I wouldn’t describe any of those as emoji.

I don’t accept that the use of emoji is a sign that people are losing the ability to communicate with words, or that they have a limited vocabulary. Some people said the same about anime and manga, but those fears were never realised. And it’s not even a generational thing … People of all ages understand that a single emoji can say more about their emotions than text. Emoji have grown because they meet a need among mobile phone users. I accept that it’s difficult to use emoji to express complicated or nuanced feelings, but they are great for getting the general message across.

I work for a different company now [network contents company Dwango] and no longer design emoji, but I still have a soft spot for the ones that communicate positive emotions. I would say the heart is my all-time favourite.

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