Everyone has crush on these
ATTRACTIVE JOURNEY A Japanese company had released the first 177 emojis on a mobile phone in 1999. Today, we have nearly 2,000 standardised ones
INTRODUCTION TO EMOJIS
These days, emojis have entered every aspect of our lives, from mobile phones, to movies and to the dictionary. These glyphs, designed for pagers made by the Japanese mobile provider NTT DoCoMo and released in 1999, were the first pictographs to make their way into mobile communication. It would take another decade for emojis to explode into an American phenomenon, when Apple integrated its first emoji set for the iPhone in 2011. There are now nearly 2,000 standardised emojis.
HISTORY OF EMOJI
The original emoji, designed by Shigetaka Kurita, were made within a grid that was just 12 pixels wide and 12 pixels long. First rendered in black and white, within a few years each emoji was painted one of six colours — black, red, orange, lilac, grass green and royal blue. Many of these symbols are illegible, their mysteries only revealed with the help of a translator. The red circle with three lines stands for ‘hot spring’; the amorphous purple blob, perhaps fittingly, translates to ‘art.’ Others are stultifying in their literalness — simple digital translations of existing symbols.
There are the 12 astrological signs, the four playing card suits, a ‘no smoking’ symbol, a bathroom sign. Simple, elegant, and incisive, Kurita’s emoji planted the seeds for the explosion of
a new visual language. EVALUATION OF EMOJIS
Here’s a rundown of some of the more memorable emoji updates in history:
– Apple’s iOS 6 update began to feature a gay and lesbian couple amid all their usual emoji characters like heterosexual couples, monkeys, painted fingernails and dancing girls.
Google finally added legitimate emoji support to its Android OS by making them part and parcel of the official Google keyboard app. Before this crucial and long-needed Android update, users had a hard time to make emojis work on their Android devices. They either had to memorise specific command words to select emojis, or they had to actually long-press their spacebars after they installed the correct language packs. As a result, Android users everywhere rejoiced, as they could now keep up with the fast and furious text messages of teenagers around the globe.
Apple decided that it was finally time to make its emoji set a whole lot more multicultural. Filled with guilt about the lack of AfricanAmerican emojis, the company finally rectified this error by working with the Unicode Consortium to include emojis depicting African-American faces in their character sets.
Just in time for the iOS 8.3 beta to its developers, Apple went a step further than its last update and made a full-out commitment to increase the racial diversity of its Shigetaka Kurita is the creator of the first-ever set of emoji. His set has been adapted, updated and expanded over the years to become the emoticons we know today. Back in 1997, Kurita worked for a Japanese mobile phone company named
NTT Docomo.
The messages that could
emoji sets. The big changes? Users for the first time could now hold down on specific emojis and choose the specific skin tone that they wanted. That extra step went a long way toward making more of Apple’s diverse, global user base feel represented in its emojis.
Apple released a big update in version 9.1 for its iPhone and iPad models; the update came with a whopping 184 more emojis for users to choose from. The most notorious addition was probably the middle finger, which pranksters had been calling on Apple to add for the longest time! Other noteworthy additions included the burrito, taco, unicorn, the Vulcan salute, the zipper mouth face, the writing hand, and the impressive speaking head in silhouette.
In its iOS 10 release, Apple finally got to gender diversity, having already tackled racial diversity in years past. The company released these emojis in the fall, and they featured more than 100 new and redesigned emoji characters that focus on gender diversity. Translation: You’ll now see more female athletes than ever as