By Alberto Gonzalez
Marketing4eCommerce Editor
DSince 2014, #WorldEmojiDay has been celebrated on July 17th , a day that commemorates the use of emoticons on all social networks. Emojis are used by millions of people every day, and they have also been used by different brands to advertise their products and have even made it to the big screen with “The Emoji Movie . ”
It was on September 19, 1982 when Scott Elliot Fahlman , a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to create the first emoticons so that people could distinguish, on an electronic message board, what the tone of the message was, using when it was a joke message or for real messages. An idea that pleased everyone and is still used by many users today.
But it was not until 1999 that the first colour emojis appeared, designed by Shigetaka Kurita , a Japanese interface designer, who created 176 12 x 12 pixel characters, inspired by Japanese culture such as manga bolivia business email database and kanji, to be used by the mobile internet platform NTT DoCoMo for which he worked. Kurita's aim was to create a purely pictographic language to convey information .
One of Kurita's first sketches for his emoji. Source: CNN
The original 176 emojis included hearts, cars and even a snowman, but surprisingly, no human faces. The word emoji comes from the Japanese words 絵 (“e,” drawing), 文 (“mo,” writing) and 字 (“ji,” character). These Japanese characters, or “kanji,” are a fundamental part of the Japanese language, and create a strong link between writing and drawing.