But why? Itās a mix of many reasons why Iām interested in Emoji.āØ I studied communication in university. Iām fascinated by how people comunicate especially using computer technologies and the internet.āØ I also love history. Especially computing history. I can get lost in reading old mailing list archive or archival video.
āØ Perhaps thatās the reason why I ended up in web development. I build tools for communication, by dealing with cause and eļ¬ects everyday in code.
Even thought i-mode was the ļ¬rst one that included a set of emoji. Emoji was used in communication device already. This Japanese version of iPhone (DP-211SW) had touch pad, supported Kanji characters, and emoji (spot the !).āØ Also, pager was really popular device, from business person to high school girls. If you dial 88, certain pagers displayed ā which was very popular.
To research for this new mobile web service, a project member was sent to California to try AT&Tās PocketNet service, which had mobile web access.
Shigetaka Kurita - who was testing Pocket Net would send email from the PocketNet phone on a train in SanFrancisco, make international phone call to the oļ¬ce in Tokyo and ask if they received it. āØ
While using PocketNet, like looking up weather, Kurita noticed that reading weather in text was rather dryā¦ and wondered if he can use weather icons like they do in TV weather forecast.
But why emoji needed to be text and displayed as font? Why not image?
Because back then i-mode had to have separate sockets - one for text and one for image, so that was not only slow to download but also used lot more data.
Also, i-mode only supported GIF for image format. Back in late 1990s, patent of GIF was still not clear so they wanted to stay out of potential trouble.
If icons are delivered as text (or code point) then they can save connection and data because it is delivered as text and pictogram is already installed in the phone.
Kurita worked as sales person for pager (pocket bell) and experienced 1st hand some customers turn away from device because it didnāt support ā. So this time, he made sure there were hearts included.
Interesting one is Cars, original set had 2 diļ¬erent types of car. āØ Back then Kurita was really into snowboarding so regular town car and SUV for outdoor was diļ¬erent thing for him :)
You might notice there is no religion or race/gender related icons in the original set.
Kurita says āI purposefully did not include emoji related to religion, country, race, or gender to avoid future conļ¬ictsā. Perhaps because it was done in conservative place (NTT - DoCoMoās parent company was THE biggest phone company which used to be owned by government). Perhaps it was great vision in designing features that has never existed before.
1st is Tokyo Olympic 1964. This was the ļ¬rst Olympic game hosted in Asia. Signs written in Japanese does not even use alphabets, so Olympic organizers needed to come up a way to communicate with international audience.
They used pictogram for that. Each sports had its own pictogram (this became Olympic tradition, every Olympic game since then has their own pictograms.)
Not only for type of sports, they also deļ¬ned informational icons like bathroom sign and restaurant/ cafe signs. This is a news paper reporting the design eļ¬ort back in 1064.āØ āØ At the end of design process, designers abandoned their copyright & released pictograms they designed as public domain so that it can be used everywhere.
Manga has itās own visual idioms to communicate emotions. This might not look anything to you, but to me who grew up reading manga and immersed in this visual communication, I can see 3 diļ¬erent scene/emotions just by adding small visual elements.
I think this is a exactly the situation emoji can shine!
Emoji can add more visual ļ¬are without adding any more data (because emoji fonts are already installed in the device). Plus, donāt you think itād be nice to have more visual diļ¬erentiator when you are in the stressful mental state, in stead of trying to parse wall of text?
In many encoding system our phone or computers turn data they received into a reference (like code points) and use that to look up letters.
ASCII or Central European encoding has been used by languages that use alphabets, for Japanese we have one called Shift-JIS that supports a lot more characters that we use in Japanese.
Shift-JIS also have empty space left for application speciļ¬c use, so emoji used this space.
Conversation table system is not really optimal, each company has to maintain table and if new company comes into market, they have to create new table again.
Better approach may be having single table to look up to (this will come in later!)
This is also the time Google was trying to break into Japanese market with gmail. To get adoption in Japan as communication service, emoji support was a kay.
iPhone ļ¬rst supported emoji only in Japanese market with iOS 2.2.āØ It is rumored Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank which had exclusive rights to sell iPhone in Japan, asked Steve Jobs to support emoji in iPhone in order to sell them in Japan.
Unicode is a project to document every letters for every language in one place. āØ Systems that support Unicode can reference one master source. (no more encoding diļ¬erences).
When you read mailing list discussion from back then, you see discussion like ādo you really need 4 diļ¬erent kind of books?ā āDo you really want to include these racial stereotype emoji?ā āwhy donāt my country have emoji ļ¬ag?ā.
It was proposed as FLAG_SYMBOL_[country] but ļ¬ag designs could change. So next proposal was to change to EMOJI_SYMBOL_[country] and let implementers decide how to display them. But country could also change, so it was settled as combination of 2 REGIONAL_INDICATOR_SYMBOLS. (visual representation is still up-to implementers. In reality mostly displayed as ļ¬ag).
Because Israelās country code is IL and Liechtensteinās country code is LI. If you put array of Israel ļ¬ag emoji in code editor and hit back space, you see Liechtenstein ļ¬ag show up.
Flag and country is a highly political subject. Recently there was a bug which crashed iPhone if iPhone user with region set to China received Taiwanese ļ¬ag.
Since Taiwan is not recognized as country in China, Apple added system to mask Taiwanese ļ¬ag if Chinese user received Taiwanese ļ¬ag, unintentionally this caused the bug that crashed iPhone entirely.
They noticed proposed emoji example (in orange line) was loosing original meaning. They explained the manga visual idioms and proposed change (in green line).
In order to display emoji with diļ¬erent skin color, a default emoji and skin tone modiļ¬er are sent as set. It is then displayed as one emoji if the system supports them or 2 (default emoji + skin tone) if not supported.
Probably the most interesting thing about emoji is that you get to help deļ¬ne new emoji. I think itās the only language in Unicode that is actively developed in stead of just documenting existing letters.
Unicode has a process to propose new emoji. There is a guideline so you canāt just add your brandās icon as emoji, but if you think certain emoji would be universally useful, you can make your own proposal.
For example, Apple proposed accessibility emoji set that includes guide dog and person with cane. It is now a draft candidate so this might make it to oļ¬cial unicode someday!
This is how person with headscarf (Hijab) emoji was added. A lady who wear hijab thought her community should be represented in emoji so she contacted Unicode.
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