Those expressive little symbols you use in texts and social media? They were first created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita!
Working for NTT DoCoMo (a Japanese mobile carrier), Kurita designed the world's first set of 176 emojis as simple 12×12 pixel images to help mobile users communicate more efficiently on small screens.
His original designs were incredibly basic by today's standards - simple hearts, weather symbols, and rudimentary facial expressions. The word "emoji" itself combines the Japanese words "e" (picture) and "moji" (character) - it has no etymological relation to the English word "emotion"!
These digital pictographs didn't reach global popularity until 2011, when Apple included an emoji keyboard in iOS 5, followed by Android adoption soon after. Today, the Unicode Standard recognizes over 3,600 emoji with new ones added annually!
Interestingly, emoji have much deeper historical roots than most realize. They're essentially a modern version of pictographs - the earliest form of written communication used by ancient civilizations thousands of years ago. In many ways, emoji represent humanity coming full circle in how we communicate!
In 2016, Kurita's original emoji set was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as part of its permanent collection - elevating these digital symbols to the status of significant cultural artifacts.