Emojis: are they the glyphs of the twenty-first century?
Emojis are impossible to ignore. Even if you don’t use them that often, they’re everywhere. In messages with family and friends to newsletters from brands, up until the communication within your company (not to mention social media).
Though we don’t remember when we started using them, emojis are a recent addition to global communication.
Using the invention of writing by the Sumerians in 3200 BCE as a starting point, and considering that verbal and written communication never stopped evolving, emojis might as well have been born yesterday.
From a design point of view, emojis are just like any other project. It evolved from an established idea — the emoticons -, mixed with research from historic inventions like glyphs and kanji characters.
Emoji is a Japanese term that derives from E — picture, and — moji — which means letter or character.
Emojis can be pictograms that resemble real-life objects, logograms that represent words, or ideograms that represent ideas or concepts. Their ability to convey emotions and daily life are what makes emojis successful and adaptable to modern communication.
Glyphs: the emojis of the Mayans
The Maya Empire, located presently in Guatemala, excelled in many things, including mathematics and writing.
They considered writing a gift from the gods that should belong to a small percentage of people, communicating between higher powers and common people.
The Mayans wrote 800 glyphs meant to be read together from left to right and top to bottom, paired in columns.
Those symbols represented words or syllables combined to signify any concept or word in the Mayan language. Anything from numbers, periods, names, titles, events, gods, objects, places, food, and more could be represented. Some glyphs would stand for more than one sound while also representing ideas, so the same intention could be conveyed in more than one way.
As a result, interpreting Maya’s writing is significantly difficult, even today, due to the possible interpretations and combination of glyphs.
In that sense, glyphs started as symbols for words, ideas, syllables, and sounds, sometimes combining more than one association.
Presently, the term glyph retains its meaning, and it’s used in different disciplines. In the design field, it refers to typographic elements.
Specific shapes of letters, accented letters, punctuation, and special characters are all glyphs.
Just like emojis, though they vary in appearance from system to system (or font), their meaning remains the same.
Emoticons: emojis predecessors
Emoticons, derived from the junction of two words emotion + icons, are a pictorial representation of a facial expression and the ancestors of the emojis.
Emoticons are built using characters like letters, numbers, and punctuation marks to express feelings, moods, and reactions to an otherwise very neutral text.
The first ones, the smiling, and upset faces, :-) and :-(, were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982.
With the SMS and the internet boom in the late 90s, emoticons were extremely popular in forums, text messages, and emails.
I remember using them a lot and still use emoticon versions like the x),:v, and the :3. They could convey sarcasm, jokes, or doubt so that messaging on the phone or internet was more personal and less grey.
The first Emojis
In 1997, SoftBank released a new mobile phone with the first known emoji set. The set included 90 black and white emojis, including the 💩, one of the most popular.
In 1999, the artist Shigetaka Kurita created emojis for Japanese mobile provider DOCOMO’s internet platform.
Kurita took inspiration from Japanese manga emotion representation, weather pictograms, Chinese characters, and street signage. These sources fit into the three categories we mentioned before — pictograms, logograms, and ideograms.
Kurita’s 176 emoji set was sketched on a 12 by 12 grid, decorated with a single color per emoji. It intended to find concise new ways to display information such as weather, traffic, and technology. And though it’s considered the first set of emojis wrongly, it’s the first one that became globally known and contributed to emojis global popularity.
Emojis quickly became popular in Japan since companies copied the idea from DOCOMO. Nokia, for instance, included a preset in the text messaging area called smileys and symbols.
Emojis and the Unicode
Unicode, the Universal Coded Character Set, has been overseeing international standardization for text characters since 1993.
In the early 2000s, mobiles and portable internet were booming. Companies outside of Japan, such as Apple, wanted to incorporate emojis on their devices.
However, during this period, several new editions released by Unicode included new written characters but left out the 1999 emoji set. This set was considered out of scope even though some glyphs were already part of the universal code.
In 2007, a development team at Google requested a petition to Unicode for recognizing and uniformizing emojis since many companies wanted to create their own set.
Two years later, Unicode and standardization institutions from several countries proposed a set — the Unicode 6.0 — released in 2010 with 722 emojis.Since that, emoji has been acknowledged as a form of communication that naturally evolved for digital needs.
Why did emojis become a global phenomenon?
Since 2015, Unicode has introduced different skin tones, cultures, disabilities, religions, gender-neutral, and sexual orientations. With the pandemic, new emojis were added to the code to represent our new reality. 🦠 😷
Anyone can submit new ideas and designs to better represent our current reality and the future, making emojis more inclusive and universally relevant. And that’s one of the reasons why emojis are so successful and will continue to evolve with our daily life and necessities.
Conclusion
Like glyphs, emojis are interpreted differently from person to person, which makes them harder to read. However, unlike the Maya system or the emoticons, emojis aren’t a stagnated form of communication that will become obsolete.
It started as symbols to convey direct information but transformed into a complex form of digital communication that is constantly changing.
