The first emoji fit in a 12 by 12 pixel square

The first emoji fit in a square of twelve by twelve pixels. It was drawn by Shigetaka Kurita, a 25-year-old Japanese designer, in 1999, for the pocket phone that the operator NTT DoCoMo had just launched: it was called i-mode and its screen could not display more resolution.

Kurita made 176 icons in less than a month. He was asked to because messages fit in 250 characters and people used them badly: a bare «okay» could offend, and a plain «happy birthday» read like a chore. The company wanted a symbol the size of a letter that said what words could not.

Kurita did not draw faces. He copied pictograms from manga, from weather bulletins, and from road signs. The classic smiling face was not his: it was added eight years later, when Apple put the emoji inside the iPhone. The photo of Kurita at that drawing table has hung since 2016 in the permanent collection of MoMA in New York.

His 176 original icons are archived as a piece of industrial design: a twelve by twelve square that beat language.