When: annually, July 17.
Use them in any digital text you plan to send on July 17, all because it’s World Emoji Day. That’s right, it’s the annual excuse to use emojis, emojis and even more emojis.
Emojis were around much before Emoji Day, of course. Let’s start with the day first. That day has been around since 2014. That that day appeared on the emoji is a reference to Apple’s launch of iCal in 2022. So that was on 17 July. So since then, we have been stuck with an emoji referring to Apple’s iCal. Even anyone who does not use this programme or app is stuck with it.
Japanese
The word emoji comes from Japanese. You may also look for the origin there. Meant to support websites. The word is actually nothing more than image and script orcharacter.
Being something that came from Japan, the first emojis were focused on that country. Only later were they adapted to the rest of the world. Emancipation of emojis also took place. Diversity was central to this. Meanwhile, emojis have also penetrated smartphones and were widely used precisely there. Today, it is less common to see them recurring on websites. If you do, it is often in the form of a reference to social media or the world of mobile devices.
NTT DOCOMO
Commissioned by NTT DOCOMO, a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), Shigetaka Kurita developed the emojis as we know them today. That was in 1999. Only the actual development of the emoji may have started much earlier. After all, there were emoticons before then. That history goes back to 1982 when Scott Fahlman introduced the world to familiar symbols like 😉 and;-(. Perhaps you could even argue that it is all even older because in 1972 an e-learning system was introduced under the name PLATO, which used pictograms. Only pictograms are not emoticons. Besides, PLATO was a system that was not widely used when it came out in 1960 and the version that would make real use of it was version PLATO IV, issued in 1972.
Wingdings
The font Microsoft came up with in 1999 was perhaps closer. That was the font Wingdings. This is a so-called dingbat. Basically nothing more than an ornament or padding. Let’s face it, you can’t write normal texts with Wingdings. It led to another successor: Webdings (1997) and some creations by legendary font developer Hermann Zapf (1918 – 2015). More of his creations can be found via the now-archived website which can be found here. More dingbats-based fonts for fans can be found via the Action Fonts website.
Yet there is another story that also needs to be told and gets much less attention. This has everything to do with a French-English invention. The Japanese name would only be there because developments in that country only led to the introduction of emojis for a specific Asian line of mobile devices. Another theory assumes an entirely different scenario and is described at this website.
The Smiley Company
Rond dezelfde tijd dat er in Japan nagedacht werd over dit onderwerp vonden er gelijkaardige ontwikkelingen plaats aan de andere kant van de wereld. Die ontwikkelingen vonden plaats in Groot-Brittannië. Daar was Nicolas Loufrani werkzaam voor het bedrijf The Smiley Company en hij zag de potentie in van het verder ontwikkelen van de tekens die eerder bedacht waren door Scott Fahlman. Eigenlijk waren dit gewoon ASCII-tekens.Loufrani was er zelfs zo ver mee gevorderd, dat hij een online woordenboek samengesteld had en gekomen was tot een overzicht van stemmings uitdrukkingen, feesten, eten. Uiteindelijk werd dit overzicht gedeponeerd bij het US Copyright Office namens Loufrani, zijn vader, Frank Loufrani. Meer informatie hierover is hier terug te vinden. The Smiley Company is overigens bekend van, inderdaad, de Smiley. Dit bedrijf heeft de rechten op de smiley in meer dan honderd landen.
The smiley became a huge success, it is fair to say. From that base, son Nicolas thought further, leading to new developments. Whereas Kurita’s ideas would eventually be copied by others, Nicolas struck a deal with big players like Motorola, Nokia and Samsung to use the emoji’s licence. Until 2011, that made The Smiley Company quite a profit. Yet nowhere do you read about this story when it comes to the history of the emojis. Except on the English-language Wikipedia page. There, it also mentions a website, Smiley Dictionary, which is now no longer available. Hence an archived version.On this website, you could find the existing emojis. Those emojis were used not only for mobile devices, but also, for example, for MSN Messenger, the predecessor of Windows Live Messenger.
It is fair to say that the end came for the Smiley Company the moment its customers decided to opt for alternatives. So in doing so, they put the Smiley Company out of business, which may explain why this company thus gets much less attention in the history of the emoji. Because the story seems much less funny when you consider that the buyers had to pay licence fees to the Smiley Company for using emojis.
Unicode
It was finally Google that took serious steps in 2007 to end the proliferation. There were now so many providers and it had all become so unclear that the decision was made to come up with a standard. This has everything to do with Unicode. A standard for encoding graphic characters and symbols of binary code. It would not become a real standard yet, as Apple was sticking to its standard. Today, the Unicode Consortium is responsible for overseeing it so that it all doesn’t become a mess.
Whichever version of the genesis you think is more important, it doesn’t matter. What matters today is July 17. That is the day that is “fixed” on the calendar emoji for now. Whatever emoji you use, on whatever device. Android or iOS. That too is Emoji Day!
So start spamming with emojis!
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