As the world braces for a bunch of new iPhone emojis this November, complete with taco (finally!) and an anatomically incorrect middle finger, let us travel way back in time to the ‘90s when emoji as we know it was born via a bad business decision. Cut to The Verge:
In 1995, sales of pagers were booming among Japan’s teenagers, and NTT Docomo’s decision to add the heart symbol to its Pocket Bell devices let high school kids across the country inject a new level of sentiment (and cuteness) into the millions of messages they were keying into telephones every day. Docomo was thriving, with a bona fide must-have gadget on its hands and market share in the neighborhood of 40 percent. But when new versions of the Pocket Bell abandoned the heart symbol in favor of more business-friendly features like kanji and Latin alphabet support, the teenagers that made up Docomo’s core customer base had no problem leaving for upstart competitor Tokyo Telemessage. By the time Docomo realized it had misjudged the demand for business-focused pagers, it was badly in need of a new killer app. What it came up with was emoji.
Shigetaka Kurita, an employee at NTT Docomo, invented emoji as a way to infuse human emotion into an otherwise stark and sometimes misinterpreted realm of mobile communication. Drawing inspiration from Japanese comics, Kurita and his team drafted 176 emoji characters, attempting to capture the complete range of human emotion.
My favorite part of this story is that Kurita was not a designer by trade but an economics major, dispelling the myth that left-brain thinkers can’t be creative.
And in closing, I leave you with a random link to Emojinalysis where you can get a psychological profile based on your frequently used emojis. Since mine are knives, pills, martinis, and bathtubs, I'll probably skip this part.
How emoji conquered the world // The Verge
Image via Cosmo, What Your Favorite Emoji Says About You
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