When the very first set of emoji was designed by Japanese engineer Shigetaku Kurita in the 1990s, pixel-y dots within a 12-by-12 dot grid were about the entirety of what could be conveyed in emoji ...

When emoji first began populating Japanese cellphone screens in 1999, modern communication was forever changed. The digital image bank, created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita to convey lengthy ...

"We are living like we're Western people," he says. "It's like we are not proud of our own culture." That even applies to the symbols he texts to friends using the messaging apps on his phone (they ...

It all started with a 3. In the late 1990s, the Japanese telecom giant NTT DoCoMo offered an early mobile service called i-mode that let users send small amounts of data over their pagers, including a ...

"I have to believe that symbols matter," the mother said. — -- The California mom who is fighting the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes, and rallied for the creation of a flat shoe emoji, ...

` ️ ⛄️ When words fail us, emoji are always there to fill in the blanks. But there are times when finding that perfect ...

Before the colourful emoji we use as shorthand and punctuation appear on our keyboards, there's a surprisingly complex bureaucratic design and selection process to go through You can't deny the ...

O'Plerou Grebet is a 22-year-old graphic design student in Ivory Coast. Everywhere he looks, he sees signs of Western influence — from the glass skyscrapers and malls lining the streets in his home ...