July 17th recognizes World Emoji Day and many of the world’s symbolic icons for digital calendars. The day encourages us to use emojis to send unique messages.
Before the emoji, there were emoticons. Emoticons (emotion + icon) was developed as an expression of emotions in the cold hard texts that were devoid of them.
Emoji, a Japanese expression, roughly means “picture word” and was created by Shigetaka Kurita in 1990. While working for the Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo, Kurita would design these picture words as a feature on their pagers to make them more appealing to teens.
