When we message someone for fun or respond to a text, we use emojis to express emotions that are hard to put into words. Who created emojis? His name is Shigetaka Kurita. He created the emoji in 1999 (Prisco par. 1) as a way of expressing emotion in a new “mobile internet system developed by Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo” (par. 7). According to CNN, DoCoMo’s email system restricted message length to “250 characters, so emoji were a way to say more in a limited space” (par. 7). When Kurita started, he had to work within a “12 by 12 pixels” grid (par. 1), but the modern emoji is now “often created with vector graphics, so [it] . . . can technically scale up to unlimited resolution” (par. 10). Emojis are a wonderful invention. How hard would it be now to communicate without them?

Reference(s): https://www.cnn.com/style/article/emoji-shigetaka-kurita-standards-manual/index.html

Fact Author: Durga I.

Fact Editor: Ace