Smiley faced success for Japan's emoji creator

From a humble smiley face with a box mouth and inverted "V's" for eyes, crude weather symbols and a rudimentary heart, emoji have now exploded into the world's fastest-growing language.

There are now about 1,800 emoji characters and counting. They cover everything from emotions and food to professions, are racially diverse and have become an integral part of the smartphone age.

The digital hieroglyphics are regarded as so significant that New York's Museum of Modern Art, which is home to works by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, is exhibiting the original 176 designs.

Shigetaka Kurita, the man who created these characters, is still surprised by the success of his idea, but says he was meeting an obvious need. "It wasn't only Japanese who felt inconvenienced when they were exchanging text messages. We were all feeling the same thing," he says.

Kurita was working at major telecom NTT Docomo in 1999 when he sketched out one of the first emoji, a clunky looking thing barely recognizable as the precursor to today's yellow smiley face.
 
Kurita was also experimenting with how to make information, such as weather forecasts, more accessible on the small screens of emerging cellphones, deciding visual aids would help. The sun and umbrella symbols, both open and closed, were among his earliest creations.

For inspiration, Kurita says he tapped Japan's popular manga comics and the country's complicated writing system that uses two sets of phonetic letters mixed with Chinese characters, known as kanji.

Keenly aware of how text messages could be misconstrued, he wanted to create visual accompaniments to help articulate tone.

"With a heart, the message can't be negative whatever the text says," Kurita explains,...