One on One: Shigetaka Kurita’s Emoji

In 1998 Shigetaka Kurita, a young designer, set about creating a large group of symbols for use in [NTT DOCOMO’s i-mode] messaging service. He brought a youthful perspective to the i-mode team: his love of tech predated his time at NTT DOCOMO—he had been an avid user of pokeberu, a passionate video gamer, and, earlier in his career, a pager salesman. These experiences greatly informed his work, so that even as he became more experienced, he still believed that his strength was “the ability to see things from the perspective of an amateur.”¹ Another of his strengths was envisioning and predicting the behavior of users, both novices and experts, which is crucial for the design of a successful interactive object or service; an interface that works against intuitive behavior can prove difficult and even unpleasant, and Kurita’s sales experience led him to suspect that navigating such a new service through various devices might be difficult. The significant development the team proposed was to turn i-mode into an information service as well as a communications platform by including characters not only for users connecting with each other (as they had been doing with pagers) but also for receiving guidance and suggestions from i-mode itself. This explains the presence of advertising and consumer-focused emoji in Kurita’s set, such as symbols for the ATM and the convenience store, as well as emoji that helped users understand complex menu options and facilitated the purchase and use of i-mode’s products and services. There were significantly fewer emoji for user-to-user expression. This set of 176 symbols featured only five faces—happy, sad, angry, disappointed, and dizzy—but they proved enormously popular, and remain among the most commonly used emoji today.

Within a tiny 12-by-12 grid of pixels, Kurita’s emoji had to be both clearly readable on small cell phone screens as well as aesthetically pleasing and appealing to use. The symbols he devised appear simple, but the technology’s restrictions presented various difficulties. The even-numbered grid, for example, made it impossible to center emoji, which affected the kerning—the carefully controlled spacing between letters and symbols that is crucial in visually appealing, easily readable text. In addition to reading visually off-center, the symbols were adapted to work at a tiny scale. When enlarged, the tail emerging from the bottom of the heart emoji, for example, composed of two vertically stacked pixels, looks idiosyncratic and unnecessary, but on the small screen of a mobile device, the tail lifts the heart off the grid’s bottom line, giving it bounce and liveliness next to ordinary text. The fog emoji is composed of a diffuse arrangement of horizontal lines that at the intended scale becomes the haze of a misty day; vertical lines, by contrast, would have looked like rain.

“Heart” and “fog” emoji shown enlarged on a 12 × 12 pixel grid and at actual size

Kurita and the i-mode team drew on a wealth of influences, including existing emoticons, kaomoji, and common icons and typographic symbols. Familiarity and ease of use (emoji were selected from a menu and sent one at a time) were of the utmost importance, but the team understood the potential for users to combine emoji with text to add emotional nuance to their messages, such as a smiley face placed next to a lewd remark. The graphic conventions and visual shorthand of manga gave them a lot of creative leeway. In manga, the appearance of swollen veins on a character’s face, rendered in a stylized x shape, indicates rage; in Kurita’s emoji set, the isolated shape, easily recognizable by Japanese teenagers and manga fans, is a shorthand for anger. Nervousness, confusion, and shock in manga are represented by sweat droplets on or around a character’s head, and i-mode’s initial set of emoji contained two sweat symbols—one rolling down and the other spraying horizontally—to express nerves, embarrassment, relief, and awkwardness. (The descendant of those early symbols, a single, sideways-squirting sweat droplet, has come to imply something far less innocent.)

The meanings of various emoji have shifted and evolved over time and across cultures. For example, the manga conventions and other cultural references in the original emoji set were lost on users outside Japan, and some remain obscure for contemporary users. In Japan, an oval shape with three wavy lines rising from it is understood to refer to bathing in hot springs and onsen (bath-houses), a common activity; in the rest of the world it is generally employed to indicate heat or a steaming beverage. A wrapped present seems straightforward enough, but in Japan it carries a further association with the intricate rituals of gift giving and omiyage (obligatory souvenir gifts brought back after a trip). The red goblin mask (added in 2003 by the cell phone company au by KDDI) depicts not a devil but the mythical tengu, an arrogant supernatural trickster.

Some of Kurita’s intended meanings have changed almost entirely. For him, the clenched fist, raised palm, and fingers in a V sign stood for the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, but today they are used to signal solidarity, the “halt” command, and peace.² The directional arrows, intended for sharing joystick sequences for video games, one of Kurita’s passions, now tend to be used for emphasis.³ Generational differences factor into conflicting interpretations; while Millennials generally use the smiley face to indicate positive feelings or events, the teenagers and young adults of Generation Z tend to read it as passive aggressive or ironic.⁴ Such informal and organic evolution of emoji use, and the variations in how the symbols are interpreted, is similar to the way all languages evolve through borrowing, adapting, and innovating.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Shigetaka Kurita: Emoji in the One on One series.