Emoji

In 1999, NTT DOCOMO released a set of 176 emojis for mobile phones and pagers to facilitate the emerging practice of text messaging. Created by Shigetaka Kurita, a young designer at the Japanese telecommunications company, these pictograms quickly became the new digital body language in the profoundly impersonal, abstract world of electronic communication. With now more than 2,600 characters, these image characters (e = image, moji = character) have become indispensable in our online interactions and are part of the long history of communication—from the invention of writing to the introduction of printing to the dramatically accelerated actions in the smartphone age. Paul Galloway, a specialist in the collection of digital designs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, demonstrates in this book that the DNA of today's emojis was already present in Kurita's pixelated designs and traces their development to their current status as a global phenomenon. Paul Galloway is a collection specialist in architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He regularly writes for MoMA publications and co-curated the 2022 exhibition "Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design" with Paola Antonelli.