The Journey of Emojis
Humans have always found creative ways of expressing ourselves. Be it with smoke signals and cave paintings to stickers and emojis that we share today. We have a weird love-hate relationship with change.
And our inner nudge to tweak things that are working alright on their own is the reason behind evolution in different fields. So the shift to Electronic communication was no different either.
The plain text message was incapable of expressing all that we feel and that’s when some creative people designed emoticons. In a way that was like cave painting too wasn’t it. Okay, I know enough with that comparison.
The original emoticons have evolved over the years becoming the way we use them now over a period of time. Presently we have thousands of emojis at our fingertips. But it wasn’t like that during the late 1990s when emoticons first started in chat rooms.
The First Emoticons
I am really amazed by the creativity of those first users. Using a winky face (;-)) to show sarcasm or a surprised emoticon(: — o) made with colon and the letter O. Such a simple way to express yourself. That reminds me of those early Facebook days when people use to draw all this elaborate drawing on other people’s comment sections. I haven’t been using Facebook for some years. Is that still a thing?
Incorporation into Mobile
Anyways In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese artist working for DOCOMO created the first-ever emoji. His original collection of emojis consisted of 176 emoji. Little trivia — this collection is now showcased at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
The creation of these emojis was a small yet significant step towards the revolution of online communication. But it was the hike in the number of mobile phone users in the coming year that lead to the exponential hike of emojis in a short span. Soon enough emojis were incorporated by tech giants like Apple and Google.
Emojis And Unicode Standard
In 2009, A pair of Apple engineers submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard. Unicode accepted this proposal in 2010 making another move towards the online communication we have come to know.
Why was this important?
Unicode’s indexing of emojis was the beginning of legitimizing emoji as a form of communication and meant that Emoji had become too big a fad to ignore. Emojis were now legit!!
Further Journey
The Unicode Consortium considers new sets of emoji every year which means emoji evolves every year alongside iOs and Android. Presently Unicode Standard consists of 2,666 emojis.
● In 2017 — the update added — Mythical creatures like mermaids, genies, elves, and vampires, new and versatile animal emojis like a dinosaur, hedgehog, giraffe, zebra, and new and trendy food emojis like pie, sandwich, broccoli, takeout.
And 6 new and inclusive emojis — three new gender-neutral options to represent people of all ages, a woman wearing a hijab, and a woman cradling a baby.
● In 2018 — We got the option to give emoji gray or red hair, and new cultural symbols like mooncakes, and Nazar amulet.
● Current Update — Was inclusive of mixed-raced/gender couples and differently-abled people, deaf people, or people in a wheelchair.
Unicode Consortium makes sure that all the trendy things have attractive emojis to go along with them. Like adding avocado in 2016. But it is clear that people are designing and Unicode is making an effort to be as inclusive as possible.
It is hard to imagine the growth of Stickers and GIFs that we now use so frequently without their ancestors that were the product of simple imagination.
So I guess we owe emojis a big thanks for making our chats so much fun.
Malayalam Keyboard with Malayalam Stickers
