The Emoji journey: From self-expression tool to multi-million dollar business
Emojis, memojis, avatars. Here’s how they evolved and still make millions to their creators.
Emojis, emoticons are the way millennials and the new Gen Z communicate. It’s hard to type how exactly you’re feeling, and emojis are perfect for showing it for you. Emojis, like human emotions, are universal and break all language barriers. You might be an emoji fan 😍 or a fanatic ❤️, hate them 👎 , or anything in between🙄, but if it’s your dear friends’ birthday, you’ll feel tempted to use one of these 🎂🍰🥳🎉🎈 . And what’s valentine’s day without sharing 💞😘.
Interestingly emojis have come a long way from the time the first smiley was designed, to the present-day Avatars we can create for ourselves. Did I already say Avatars? I’ve got it covered.
Origin of the smileys 🙂
Ever wondered how or who created the first yellow smiley-face we use at least once in our chats?
The original smiley face was created by Harvey Ball in 1963 for The State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance). The insurance firm had made some difficult acquisitions and mergers that consequently resulted in low employee morale. The insurance firm hired freelance designer Harvey Ball to create something to uplift the employees’ sentiment. In less than 10 minutes and for $45, Harvey Ball made the now-iconic smiley face. 🙂 The original smiley face has two oval eyes, one smaller than the other, and the smile is not perfectly curved. Take a look.
The company created pins with the smiley for their 100 employees, and soon clients too asked for it. The smiley face became insanely popular over the next decade, and they did not bother to copyright it. The smiley made its way on buttons, posters, signposts, and greeting cards.
These smileys also served to uplift Vietnam’s soldiers and citizens grappling with the war in the early 1970s. In 1971, Bernard and Murray Spain noticed this smiley face in Hallmark stores in Philadelphia. They added “Have a happy day” below the smiley, made their own fancy products with the symbol, and had sold 50 million buttons by the end of the year.
Charlie Ball now runs World Smile Foundation, a non-profit grassroots-level charitable organization founded by his late father, Harvey Ball.
Another French journalist Franklin Loufrani used smileys in his newspaper France Soir to indicate a piece of good news. He officially registered the smile or smiley symbol for commercial use in 1972. The company manufactures a variety of goods with the smiley as their logo to date.
Smileys and Emojis in the Early Internet Era
Remember the Yahoo Messenger Chat room’s animated emoticons? I thought they were more emotive than what we have today. It was such an 80s kid thingy. Those cool chat rooms, chatting with several people in multiple windows. The cyber cafes around my house were always full of teenagers blushing at the screen and a few uncles too. Just for the record, Yahoo’s chat was launched in Mar 1998, but sadly it was shut down in July 2018 with its decline in popularity.
The term emoji comes from Japanese(絵文字), which loosely translates to a pictogram. They were first created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer, and his team who worked for NTT, DOCOMO, a Japanese telecom major. He had to design images in a constricted 12x12 pixel grid.
NTT had released a pager aimed at teenagers that had an option to send a heart shape in the messages. This pager became a hit, and gradually many more symbols were added to it.
The said telecom company also supported sending short 250 character emails in their service. So they introduced emojis so users could say more with the emoticons. However, the most used smiley emojis were never part of the first 176 emoticons Kurita created. They were mostly informational emojis that had moon phases, vehicles, and the weather.
The Museum of Modern Arts (MOMA) hosts the original first collection of emojis created by Kurita because they marked a paradigm shift in how we express ourselves.
Wonder Why the Smileys Were Always Yellow?
The logic behind why the smileys are yellow and also bald has several explanations. Some say the expressions look better with a yellow background and easier on the eyes. Can we imagine using a red, blue, green, or orange smiley?🤷♀️
The reason it is bald is to bring the focus on the expression. A popular belief is, the emojis were inspired by the original smiley created by Harvey Ball.
Present Day Emoji Scene
In the early 2000s, there were 100s of encoding tools used that often didn’t work universally. Even in around 2015, emoji sent from an Android phone to an iPhone often arrived as ??? or an emoji from iPhone showed up as 𓂺𓂺𓂺𓂺𓂺 on Android. There came a need for emojis to work across platforms irrespective of the base language or keyboard supported.
We don’t just use emoji on Whatsapp, but also on other messengers like FB messenger, Slack, and emails. (And the new Clubhouse too?) So it is but essential to have a standard emoji set to communicate our moods and emotions without any barriers/constraints?
It led to the centralization of emojis that work well everywhere.
Unicode, a non-profit organization, became that repository that weighs every proposed emoji and okays it. All emojis are now updated, revised, and maintained by Unicode Consortium. So now, Operating System (OS) developers have one place to export all the supported emojis to their platform to work seamlessly anywhere.
Unicode has a technical approving committee to decide on the necessity of approving newly encoded characters. Currently, the members of the group include Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, and SAP SE and the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs of Oman,
Know what’s the most used emojis today?
Lol 😂 and Love ❤️ emojis top the most-used emojis list, 😍 and 🤣 come a close second, and the third most used emojis are 😊 🙏 💕 😭 😘.
Smileys and hearts just aren’t enough for everything we want to say.
The standard categories of emojis apart from the classic Smileys are Gestures and Body Parts, People and Fantasy, Clothing and Accessories, Animals & Nature, Food & Drink, Activity and Sports, Travel & Places, Objects, Symbols, Non-Emoji Symbols.
Presently we see emojis that are more ethnically inclusive, with many shades and skin tones being regularly added. The skin tone palette currently features Pale, Cream, Cream White Emojis, Brown Emojis, Dark Brown Emojis, Black Emojis.
Unicode recommends checking out Emojipedia, Emojitracker, and Emojination for more emoji facts and trivia. Unicode accepts support to its non-profit endeavors by offering emojis for adoption. You can buy a 🍕 for your new pizza outlet business or to show your love for it. Or even gift your partner a 💍 and support their cause — “Everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers”.
“Everyone in the world should be able to use their own language on phones and computers”.
Have an idea for a great emoji? Unicode Consortium allows submission of emoji proposals by anyone although the acceptance depends on a lot of other criteria. The doors are however closed until April 2021 due to COVID-19.
Other Ways Emojis Are Part of Our Life
- Whether you’re an emoji buff or not, you’d have received these creative emoji puzzles to guess the movie name in any of your friends’ groups. I remember this was a rage a couple of years back and still does its rounds time and again.
- And not to forget the humble stress-relieving smiley balls that are usually freebies in several business events.
- Experian reported in their 2018 study that emojis in email subject line increased the open-rate by 56% at times. 😮 Return Path published a research report recently on how emails using emojis in subject lines performed in various holiday promotional emails.
- Using emojis in promotional blog posts, tweets, FB, and Instagram are common today. 🤷
- Tried using emojis on sales pages? Or on websites for personal branding? That’s big these days. Leading industries that use emojis are beauty, fashion, travel, coaching, and lifestyle blogs. 🤑 The fastest way to include an emoji to your blog post when using a laptop I discovered is by copying from Emojipedia that Unicode recommends.
Check out the top emojis that increased open rates and used in many blogs and websites. 🎁⭐✈️😃💗🥂 🎉 - Smileys and emojis are also used in millions of stores and restaurants, and websites to seek feedback.🤝
Bitmoji, Memoji, and Avatars
The emoji’s are undergoing a transformation of sorts. You might have used or familiar with WhatsApp Stickers, Snapchat’s Bitmoji features, Apple’s Memoji, and now Facebook’s launch of avatars in May 2020. They are all heading towards our unique profiles’ personalization; by choosing hairstyles, outfits, skin tones, and mimicking us. Emojis and Avatars have taken self-expression into a virtual reality zone. It would be exciting to see what else in technology this new decade brings with it.
Some consider emojis are a cute way of better self-expression, but some may feel it is just another tech-wave 🌊. The next trend in emoji land points at going back to the Yahoo age of animated emoticons on our smartphones. A few folks have even made several millions of dollars developing emoji Apps. Surprisingly the GIFs, though popular, haven’t replaced emojis. Maybe because it’s always easier to pull a lightweight emoji than a GIF. Seeing the latest innovations in this space, Emojis and now Avatars are here to stay emoting our virtual selves. Maybe these emojis one day, even be like 3D real-time mimicking us? Who knows?
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