Emoji Pictographic Language

• Draw each sign as one character on a square em: a single face, hand, animal, object, food or flag, centred on a transparent ground with no frame or scene, sized to sit on the line beside the text with about the advance width of a CJK ideograph. Turn long objects, such as a pencil, a kitchen knife, a syringe or a wrench, to a 45-degree angle so that they fill the square.
• Reduce the sign to the core shape everyone already knows from other vendors' sets and keep its facing direction, so that it still reads at text size and does not change meaning when it crosses platforms.
• Build faces as a round disc in a non-realistic yellow with a few dark features, after the yellow-and-black smiley of the 1960s and 1970s, and carry tone of voice with comic shorthand borrowed from manga (manpu): a drop of sweat for nerves, streaming tears, hearts for eyes.
• On a coarse keitai grid, give each glyph one flat colour (monochrome at J-Phone in 1997, one colour per sign at DoCoMo in 1999) and let the set as a whole be polychrome. From 2008, colour every sign in saturated polychrome that ignores the surrounding text colour, pick one rendering for the whole set (flat fills, soft gradients with a highlight, or a 3D render that models each sign as a volume with lighting and shadow, as Apple from iOS 10.2, Fluent 3D and Noto 3D do) and hold it across thousands of glyphs, and where a sign's colour would vanish into a white or dark message bubble, give it a faint, narrow contrasting edge. For text presentation, draw a monochrome version as a simple foreground shape that takes the colour of the text.
• Design a set, not a picture: follow the Unicode list and names, draw your own dialect of every sign, and let people take the five skin-tone modifiers and combine into family, profession and flag sequences.

Japan. Pictograph sets on Japanese electronic organisers were precursors: Sharp's PA-8500 PDA of October 1988, with over 100 signs on 16 x 16 pixels, the earliest known set resembling today's emoji keyboards, and NEC's PI-ET1 of 1990; the word 絵文字 already stood beside such a set in the 1988 manual of Toshiba's JW 95F Rupo word processor, and DoCoMo put a heart on its pagers in 1995. J-Phone (now SoftBank) put 90 monochrome emoji on the Pioneer DP-211SW for its SkyWalker service, released on 1 November 1997, but the handset sold poorly and no other J-Phone model supported them. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode launched in 1999 with 176 emoji on a 12 x 12 pixel grid, each in a single colour, planned and led by Shigetaka Kurita of the i-mode team, who drew on sources that MoMA's text lists as manga, Zapf Dingbats and commonly used emoticons; by Kurita's own account (tweets of 27 October 2016) he sent his samples and list to the architect Jun Aoki for the design, and the original designs owe most to Aoki. Rival carriers made their own different but partly overlapping sets in incompatible encodings. From August 2007 Mark Davis, Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer of Google, joined by Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida of Apple, petitioned the Unicode Technical Committee; the first emoji characters entered Unicode 5.2 in 2009 and the remaining carrier emoji Unicode 6.0 in October 2010. The round yellow face now standard in vendor sets does not come from Kurita's set: according to Wikipedia, citing the Guardian, it evolved from other emoticon sets. Apple's 2008 set was drawn to convey the same sentiment as SoftBank's, and the digital smileys of the time, among them the 471 that Nicolas Loufrani filed with the US Copyright Office in 1999, continued the yellow-and-black smiley designs of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Harvey Ross Ball's of 1963. Since then Unicode fixes each sign's code point and name and every platform vendor draws its own version; new signs reach the list through proposals that anyone, from individuals to non-profits, companies and governments, may submit to Unicode.

1. Unicode Consortium, Unicode Technical Standard #51: Unicode Emoji, https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/ (emoji are 'pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text'; 'Emoji became available in 1999 on Japanese mobile phones', carriers' different sets and incompatible encodings, undisplayable characters shown as the geta mark; first emoji in Unicode 5.2 (2009), the remaining 608 carrier emoji in Unicode 6.0 (2010); the standard's images are illustrative only and designers 'should maintain the same "core" shape' and facing direction; square aspect ratio 'deriving from their origin in Japanese', about the vertical placement and advance width of CJK ideographs; 'a faint, narrow contrasting border'; emoji presentation multicoloured and independent of text colour, while 'a text presentation is a simple foreground shape whose color is determined by other information', requested via VS15 (VS16 for emoji presentation); five skin-tone modifiers from Unicode 8.0 based on the Fitzpatrick scale and a 'generic, non-realistic skin tone' otherwise; ZWJ and flag sequences)
2. Jeremy Burge, 'Correcting the Record on the First Emoji Set', Emojipedia, 8 March 2019, https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-first-emoji-set/ (J-Phone's 90 emoji on the SkyWalker DP-211SW, released 1 November 1997, designers unknown, overlooked because the handset sold poorly and no other J-Phone model supported them; DoCoMo's 176 emoji as 12 x 12 pixel images, included in i-mode from the start; 'Docomo had a single heart available on its pagers as early as 1995')
3. Keith Broni, 'New Earliest "Emoji" Sets From 1988 & 1990 Uncovered', Emojipedia, 13 May 2024, https://blog.emojipedia.org/new-earliest-emoji-sets-from-1988-and-1990-uncovered/ (the Sharp PA-8500, a PDA 'released in October 1988', with over 100 signs 'rendered in 16x16 instead of 12x12', 'the earliest known example of an emoji-like character set that reflects our contemporary emoji keyboards'; NEC's PI-ET1 PDA, released in August 1990)
4. Keith Broni, 'The Word "Emoji" Is Older Than You May Think', Emojipedia, 16 July 2026, https://blog.emojipedia.org/the-word-emoji-is-older-than-you-may-think/ (the manual of Toshiba's Rupo JW95F word processor, 1988, heads a table of selectable pictographic symbols with the word 絵文字; not the earliest use of the word itself, which appears in a 1954 dictionary)
5. Jeremy Burge, 'Who Created the Original Apple Emoji Set?', Emojipedia, 21 November 2018, https://blog.emojipedia.org/who-created-the-original-apple-emoji-set/ (Raymond Sepulveda, Angela Guzman and Ollie Wagner; iPhone OS 2.2, 21 November 2008; 471 characters, at first for Japan only; designed from scratch to match the sentiment of the SoftBank set)
6. Wikipedia, 'Emoji', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji (etymology e 'picture' + moji 'character'; Sharp PA-8500 (1988) and NEC sets on portable organisers uncovered in 2024; Toshiba JW 95F Rupo word-processor manual (1988) as the earliest known use of 絵文字 beside a set; J-Phone's 90 emoji of 1997, '12 by 12 pixels and monochrome'; Kurita's 176 for i-mode, 1999, 'brightly colored, albeit with a single color per grapheme', and 'The yellow-faced emoji in current use evolved from other emoticon sets and cannot be traced back to Kurita's work', both citing Justin McCurry, the Guardian, 27 October 2016; MoMA acquisition, October 2016; 'Nicolas Loufrani applied to the US Copyright Office in 1999 to register the 471 smileys that he created'; the 2007 petition by Mark Davis, Kat Momoi and Markus Scherer, joined by Peter Edberg and Yasuo Kida of Apple; Unicode 6.0, October 2010, with 722 emoji; Apple's keyboard in Japan with iPhone OS 2.2 and worldwide with iOS 5.0 in 2011; Gmail emoji October 2008; Noto Emoji project from 2012; Segoe UI Emoji as Microsoft's colour emoji font; Unicode 8.0 skin-tone modifiers, 2015; the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee taking emoji requests; Apple's pistol redrawn as a water pistol, announced 1 August 2016, Microsoft's revolver the next day, most platforms on the water gun by 2018)
7. Wikipedia, 'Shigetaka Kurita', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shigetaka_Kurita (born 1972; 176 pictograms on 'a grid of 12x12 pixels', most of them coloured; inspired by manga symbols called manpu, weather pictograms, Chinese characters and street signs; the yellow-faced emoji cannot be traced to his set; MoMA's 'Inbox: The Original Emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita', 2016; also held by M+, Hong Kong)
8. Wikipedia, 'Smiley', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley (lead: 'More yellow-and-black designs appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, including works by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963'; digital emoticons 'are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the yellow and black design')
9. Wikipedia (Japanese), '携帯電話の絵文字', https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/携帯電話の絵文字 (emoji first developed as external-character glyphs showing 12 x 12 dot pictograms; J-Phone's Pioneer DP-211SW for SkyWalker, 1997, with 90 emoji, the first mobile phone with emoji; DoCoMo's i-mode set by Kurita; carrier sets without a unified design; '栗田によれば、絵文字のデザインをまとめたのは建築家の青木淳だという', per Kurita the emoji designs were put together by the architect Jun Aoki)
10. Architecturephoto, 「MoMAに収蔵された事が話題となっている携帯電話の「絵文字」のデザインを手掛けたのは、建築家の青木淳だった」, 1 November 2016, https://architecturephoto.net/56457/ (relays Kurita's tweets of 27 October 2016: he calls himself a non-designer; after making samples he commissioned the design from the architect Jun Aoki along with the list; the original designs include his own, but owe most to Aoki (青木淳さんによるところが大きい))
11. Shanika Gunaratna, 'The original set of emojis is now at the Museum of Modern Art', CBS News, 26 October 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/original-emojis-now-at-the-museum-of-modern-art/ (176 emoji by Kurita, a gift of NTT DOCOMO; 12 x 12 pixels; weather symbols, a heart, zodiac signs, facial expressions and a couple of cats; Paul Galloway, MoMA's 'architecture and design collection specialist', and his quote; an installation opening in December 2016)
12. Nina Azzarello, 'MoMA acquires the original set of emoji made in 1999', designboom, 27 October 2016, https://www.designboom.com/design/moma-acquires-original-emoji-set-collection-10-27-2016/ (quotes MoMA's text by Paul Galloway, collection specialist in the department of architecture and design: Kurita worked on 'a small grid of 12 x 12 pixels', 'drawing on sources as varied as manga, zapf dingbats, and commonly used emoticons', for a set of 176 with weather phenomena, pictograms like the heart and expressive faces)
13. Museum of Modern Art, collection record 'Shigetaka Kurita. Emoji. 1998-99', https://www.moma.org/collection/works/196070 (catalogue data as indexed by a web search, since the page itself refused automated fetching: Architecture and Design, object number 961.2016, gift of NTT DOCOMO, digital image; the set released in 1999 for mobile phones and pagers on a twelve-by-twelve-pixel grid)
14. Wikipedia, 'Apple Color Emoji', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Color_Emoji (PNG glyphs in the sbix table in square strikes of 20, 32, 40, 48, 64, 96 and 160 pixels; first version with iPhone OS 2.2, November 2008, 471 glyphs; 'deep, saturated colors and gradual transitions of color', often with subtle gloss; iOS 8.3 skin tones and neutral yellow faces, 2015; iOS 10.2 redesign of December 2016, many designs apparently 3D-rendered)
15. Twemoji, https://github.com/twitter/twemoji and https://github.com/jdecked/twemoji (repository created November 2014; code MIT, graphics CC BY 4.0; SVG assets for U+1F600, U+1F602, U+2764, U+1F355, U+1F44D, U+1F340, U+1F4A7 and U+1F31E inspected: flat fills on a 0 0 36 36 viewBox, no gradients or strokes; colours #FFCC4D, #664500, #DD2E44, #5DADEC, #77B255, #F4900C)
16. Google Fonts, Noto Emoji, https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji (NotoColorEmoji in the CBDT/CBLC colour font format, and 2D/fonts also holds the vector Noto-COLRv1.ttf; monochrome version as a variable font; fonts SIL OFL 1.1, tools and most images Apache 2.0; 2D SVG assets inspected: U+1F600 and U+1F602 faces use a radialGradient with stops #fde030, #f7c02b and #f4a223, the pizza slice and thumbs-up use no gradient; the repository root now holds 2D and 3D folders)
17. Wikipedia, 'Noto fonts', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts (Noto Color Emoji in the OpenType CBDT format; monochrome Noto Emoji as a variable font from Light to Bold; 'In 2026, Google updated its Noto Emoji library to a new 3D style')
18. Keith Broni, 'Google Debuts Noto 3D Emoji Overhaul on Pixel 11', Emojipedia, 21 August 2026, https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-debuts-noto-3d-emoji-overhaul-on-pixel-11/ (Noto 3D previewed in May 2026; first available on Pixel 11 devices on their release, 20 August 2026; earlier Noto designs were flat with gradient effects, Noto 3D renders each emoji as a volumetric object with lighting and shadow); Jennifer Daniel, 'Express yourself with our new 3D emoji', Google blog, 12 May 2026, https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/noto-3d-emoji/ ('Noto 3D will be available across Google, starting with Pixel phones, later this year')
19. Microsoft, Fluent Emoji, https://github.com/microsoft/fluentui-emoji ('a collection of familiar, friendly, and modern emoji from Microsoft'; MIT; each asset folder holds 3D, Color, Flat and High Contrast versions; the Color grinning face built from layered gradients, the Flat version without any)
20. Emojipedia, 'Microsoft', https://emojipedia.org/microsoft (emoji provided by the Segoe UI Emoji font; the Fluent set in Windows 11 since the November 2021 update, previewed ahead of World Emoji Day 2021; the 3D Fluent set more broadly available across Windows 11 as of 2025)
21. Wikipedia, 'Segoe', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segoe (Microsoft's colour support in fonts first implemented in Segoe UI Emoji)
22. OpenMoji, 'About' and 'Styleguide', https://openmoji.org/about/ and https://openmoji.org/styleguide/ (open-source project of 50+ students and 2 professors of HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, initiated and supervised by Benedikt Groß and Daniel Utz; CC BY-SA 4.0; contours of '2px weight, round corners and ends'; lighter colours for fills, darker for shading; 'All objects should be displayed 2-dimensionally from the front'; emoji faces inside a smaller circle to leave room for tears or hands)
23. Manon Baeza, 'How the Kawaii Aesthetic Captured the World', Pen, 27 March 2020, https://pen-online.com/culture/how-the-kawaii-aesthetic-captured-the-world (kawaii as an escapist culture at the edges of a stoic, repressive traditional Japanese culture: 'This alternative culture also gave birth to emojis and to the brand Hello Kitty')
24. Unicode Consortium, 'Emoji Submission FAQ', https://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_submission.html (the emoji submission process is 'fair, balanced, and open to anyone, from individuals to non-profits to companies to governments')
25. Emojipedia, entries 'Pencil', 'Syringe', 'Kitchen Knife' and 'Wrench', https://emojipedia.org/pencil, https://emojipedia.org/syringe, https://emojipedia.org/kitchen-knife, https://emojipedia.org/wrench (pencil 'Positioned at a 45° angle, with its tip at either lower left or right depending on the vendor'; syringe 'Generally depicted at a 45° angle'; kitchen knife 'positioned at a 45° angle, often with its point at the lower right'; wrench 'Generally positioned at a 45° angle')

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