A closer look
Shigetaka Kurita, an interface designer for a Japanese mobile provider, created the original set of one hundred and seventy-six emojis in 1999 on a grid of merely twelve by twelve pixels to help convey complex human emotions within extremely short weather and traffic updates. These primitive, highly pixelated digital hieroglyphics were originally meant to streamline practical communication but quickly evolved into an incredibly chaotic global visual language devoid of any standardized grammatical rules. Now we rely on heavily illustrated eggplants, peaches, and crying-laughing faces to convey entire paragraphs of nuanced romantic or sarcastic intent, entirely regressing back to a primitive state of pictorial communication just to avoid typing out complete sentences
