Yesterday, we visited the MoMA to see Pirouette, an exhibition about iconic designs. I had a few interesting aha moments. For example, I always thought that Emojis are just improved, graphical versions of emoticons, like the little character-based ones such as the iconic :–) we used in emails and texts.
But no, emojis were created by NTT DoCoMo in Japan for cellphone text messages. Emoji is a Japanese word (meaning picture character) and has nothing to do with Emoticon. The original set (see above) was more functional and didn’t even include the smiley variations we use today.