Emojis as we know them today were first designed in 1999 by Japanese interface designer Shigetaka Kurita for the mobile internet service i-mode at the telecom company NTT DoCoMo, using a set of 176 tiny 12×12 pixel symbols. However, the idea of pictorial symbols and emoticons goes back much further, from 19th‑century printed “typographical art” faces to simple text emoticons like :-) that appeared in the late 20th century.

Quick Scoop: Who “created” emojis?

  • The most widely credited “creator” of modern emojis is Shigetaka Kurita, who led the design of a 176‑icon emoji set in 1999 for NTT DoCoMo’s i‑mode mobile internet platform.
  • His icons were tiny, grid‑based images meant to convey weather, emotions, activities, and symbols quickly on small, low‑resolution phone screens.
  • Kurita’s original set is considered so foundational that the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it as part of its collection in 2016.

Before emojis: smileys and emoticons

Long before smartphone keyboards, people were already trying to add “tone of voice” to text.

  • Printed predecessors include typographical smiley‑like faces published in magazines in the late 19th century, using punctuation as “typographical art.”
  • In the late 20th century, internet users popularized emoticons like :-) and :-(, built only from keyboard characters to signal jokes, irony, or mood in plain text messages.

How Kurita’s emojis changed things

Kurita’s work turned those abstract smileys into a systematic visual language for mobile devices.

  • The NTT DoCoMo set included 176 colorful pictograms representing weather, emotions, technology, and everyday objects, all optimized for the technical limits of late‑1990s Japanese phones.
  • Many core concepts in today’s Unicode emoji set—such as hearts and basic faces—can be traced conceptually back to Kurita’s grid‑based designs.

From one designer to a global standard

Today, emojis are not the creation of a single individual but of a global standardization process.

  • Modern emojis are coordinated through the Unicode Consortium, whose emoji subcommittee reviews proposals and decides which new emojis get encoded each year.
  • This means contemporary emojis are collaboratively designed and then implemented with slightly different visual styles by major platforms like Apple, Google, and others, all following the same underlying Unicode code points.

Why “who created emojis” has more than one answer

So the honest answer splits into “founder figure” and “broader history.”

  • If the question is about the first widely recognized, digital mobile emoji set, the name is Shigetaka Kurita and NTT DoCoMo in 1999.
  • If the question is about the visual language used today, it is the result of decades of evolution—from early emoticons, through Kurita’s set, to Unicode’s ongoing standardization work with designers around the world.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.