World Emoji Day 2020

July 17 is celebrated as World Emoji Day, an unofficial holiday.

Emojis, symbols of the visual language, have become a part of our everyday life. They were designed with the intention of adding emotions to the digital language. Peeking out from smartphone screens, they are now on clothing, shoes, arts, cakes, gift items, plush toys, and in many more forms.

Who created Emojis?

Emojis were first created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita.  He worked with Japan’s main mobile carrier DOCOMO, on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform with the goal of finding new ways to express information. Emojis weren’t 3D in the initial days as we see them now. Kurita sketched emojis as a set of images that can be sent on mobiles and pages as individual characters within the i-mode interface, which implies that they were not international.