You guys spend a lot of time using social media but have you ever wondered from where emojis came from, who invented them, or who first designed them ? 

Emojis are all over the place, and you truly can't interact with any gadgets or platform these days without sending or receiving an emoji. They speak to the ubiquity of this form of communication. Here's your comprehensive walk-through on the fascinating and relatively new history of emojis in all their smiley and expressive glory.

Difference Between Emojis And Emoticons

Before the emoji, there were emoticons. Emoticons (emotion + icon) was an expression of emotions in the cold texts that were devoid of them.

Before we get into the history of emojis, there needs to be a quick clarification on emojis versus emoticons, as people sometimes get too confused or use the words interchangeably.
There is a lot of difference between both of them.

Emojis are real images and symbols that are rendered on your gadgets, or you can say emojis are a pictorial representation of feelings, moods, objects, etc. Whereas emoticons are old-school expressions and faces created with general characters from your keyboard.

For instance, the yellow smiley face and all its variations that are rendered on your smartphone is an emoji. This expression  :)  is called an emoticon.

Origin Of Emojis

Did you know that the very first emoji was created 20 years ago? The designers wanted to allow people to communicate easily with the help of emojis.
Years ago, when Cellphone users in Japan were increasingly using picture messages as a way to communicate. Mobile phone companies noticed this trend because pictures are much larger than text messages. A single picture message can replace long texts, paragraphs and can save time.

Mobile operators were already struggling to support the need of 80 million users of a rapidly   growing technology. Engineers were told to fix this problem. The solution? Emoji


In 1998, Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at Docomo, created their first set of 176 emojis so customers could communicate through icons.



Shigetaka Kurita : The man who invented the emoji
Shigetaka Kurita : The man who invented the emoji


Kurita wasn’t a designer, but he was an economics major who got stuck designing them because nobody within Docomo was enthusiastic about his emoji idea. Kurita created Docomo’s first set of emojis using a 12-pixel by 12-pixel grid. The resulting emojis were very simple but surprisingly elegant.

Emoji as We Know Them Today, Became a Part of Our Digital Lives!

Emoji have come to embody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate,” the Oxford Dictionary said in a statement.

 

Whether it’s emoji or Memoji, these pictorial representations have developed in a fascinating way to reinvent how we communicate. They have traveled a long way to add colors to our lives. While each phase has its own space in our lives, which one you still love the most? Or miss it while thinking of the good old days? Do let us know in the comment section and let’s see which one wins.

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