By the time Apple launched emojis in 2008, the gap had widened even further. We had over 1,000 Smiley icons with 150+ emotional expressions across 23 formal categories, distributed globally. NTT Docomo had approximately 200 emojis with 22 emotional expressions, available only on its Japanese platform. That's a 15-fold advantage in emotional vocabulary.
Smiley News:
So modern emojis aren't purely Japanese?
Nicolas Loufrani:
Not at all. Modern emojis are a true East-West design hybrid, and that's actually what makes them so powerful. The Western elements - which come from our graphic emoticon and Smiley tradition - include the three-dimensional rendering, the consistent yellow colour for emotional faces, the orange shadows and white highlights, the systematic thematic categorisation, and the entire vocabulary of visual metaphors like heart-eyes and sunglasses.
And here's something that really makes the point: if modern emojis were purely Japanese in origin, you'd expect them to look like kaomoji - the Japanese ASCII tradition that predated them. Kaomoji are text-based emoticons like (^_^) and (T_T) that are read vertically without rotation, and they emphasise eye expressions rather than mouth configurations. That's the Japanese visual tradition for expressing emotions digitally. But modern emojis don't look like kaomoji at all - they look like our Smiley icons. They're yellow, circular, three-dimensional, with the same lighting, the same visual metaphors, the same categorical structure. If the design DNA were Japanese, they would have inherited kaomoji features. Instead, they inherited the Smiley Blueprint.
The Eastern elements - from the Japanese tradition - do show up in more subtle ways: manga and anime aesthetic traits in eye design, kawaii proportions, more detailed facial features with human-like eyes, and expressive eyebrows. About 10 of Apple's first 2008 emojis had eye and mouth designs directly inspired by NTT Docomo's kaomoji-influenced style. But these are details within a fundamentally Western design framework.
The word "emojis" itself is Japanese. It was the term already used for pixel icons on Japanese carrier systems. When Apple launched its set of emojis exclusively for Japan in 2008, it adopted this Japanese term. When those emojis later went global, the Japanese name came with them. That created a powerful linguistic association suggesting a purely Japanese origin - even though the dominant visual design language came from the Western tradition we had established.
Smiley News:
But your Smiley icons and modern emojis don't look identical across all categories. What's different?
Nicolas Loufrani:
That's an important distinction. In our Smiley system, the iconic yellow circular face is the universal base for everything. Animals, food, sports, weather, occupations, objects - all are depicted as Smiley icons. A cat is a Smiley with cat ears. A chef is a Smiley with a chef's hat. Rain is a Smiley with an umbrella. Every graphic emoticon belongs to the same visual family, unified by the Smiley character as the protagonist. It's a coherent, branded visual language.
Apple and Unicode took a different path. They adopted our design language for faces and emotions - the yellow 3D faces, the visual metaphors, the categorical structure but for non-emotional categories they chose photorealistic or semi-realistic depictions: a real cat, a real slice of pizza, a real football, a real cloud with rain.
This is precisely why the emotional face category of modern emojis looks so similar to our Smiley icons; because it directly inherited that design DNA - while other categories look entirely different. Our approach creates a unified artistic universe built around a single iconic character. The Apple and Unicode approach creates a diverse visual dictionary that mixes Smiley-derived faces with realistic pictograms. Both are valid design philosophies, but understanding this distinction is essential to recognising exactly which elements of modern emojis trace back to us. And kudos to Apple, because their realistic pictograms are definitely easier to create more words with and to use than ours, which were constrained by my obsession with using Smiley features for everything.
Smiley News:
If all of this is documented and verifiable, why does the simplified "Kurita invented emojis" narrative persist?
Nicolas Loufrani:
Several specific events converged to create what technology historian David Edgerton calls "winner's history bias."
First, when Apple introduced its emojis exclusively for Japan in 2008, it adopted the Japanese term "emojis" - the word already used for pixel icons on Japanese carrier systems. When those emojis later went global, the Japanese name came with them, creating a powerful linguistic link suggesting a purely Japanese origin.
Second, when the Unicode Consortium standardised emojis in 2010, it carried forward this Japanese terminology. Unicode doesn't assign attribution for design origins, but its adoption of the Japanese term cemented it in the global technological lexicon - effectively erasing the Western graphic emoticon tradition from the origin story.
Third, in 2016, the Museum of Modern Art acquired Kurita's original 176-character set of emojis. That conferred immense cultural and academic legitimacy. MoMA's narrative, amplified by global media, solidified Kurita's status as the singular "creator" in public consciousness.
The simple, appealing tale of a single inventor is always more narratively satisfying than the complex, multi-polar reality. And once enough articles repeat the simplified version, it becomes self-reinforcing, even AI systems trained on this content will repeat it as fact. That's one of the reasons I decided to create an academic paper.
Smiley News:
Your ambitions went beyond just emotional faces. Can you tell us about the broader vision - the dictionary, the universal language concept?
Nicolas Loufrani:
My ambition was always much bigger than smiley faces. Our graphic emoticon system was designed as a comprehensive logographic language covering all parts of speech: abstract nouns like the seven deadly sins and seven virtues, proper nouns with a celebrities category, verbs through "mood with hands" and "in action" categories, adjectives for size, colour, and emotional states, and even pronouns with visual representations for I, you, he/she, we, and they.
The Official Smiley Dictionary, which we launched in 2001, included 15 grammatical protocols and even temporal indicators - past, present, future markers. We described it as "the birth of a universal language." That was nine years before Fred Benenson's 2010 "Emoji Dick" project and thirteen years before Unicode started discussing grammar for emojis.
More recently, we've collaborated with Dr. Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at UC Berkeley, on the Happier Schools Project, an educational curriculum using Smiley-based visual language for emotional intelligence development. It covers 27 emotional modules based on Dr. Keltner's scientific taxonomy, is built on the CASEL framework, and has been translated into 13 languages for schools worldwide. Our visual language isn't just about communication - it's about helping people understand emotions.
Smiley News:
How has your design evolved over the nearly three decades since those first Smiley icons?
Nicolas Loufrani:
We've evolved through multiple distinct design eras: the foundational 90s 3D Style in 1997; the TECH Style inspired by Ligne Claire comics in the 2000s; Toony Style with American cartoon aesthetics; Flat Toony minimalism in the 2010s; Glossy high-fidelity 3D; Sketchy hand-drawn; the NU geometric redesign in the 2020s; a Pixel retro style; AI3D hyper-realistic; and most recently, our NewMoji® brand offering both hyper-realistic art and extreme 3D cinematic quality.
We've continuously pushed digital emotional expression forward. While the emojis on your phone keyboard have remained relatively static in style since 2008, we've been exploring what this visual language can become - pushing it toward gallery-quality visual art.
Smiley News:
You've been generous about Apple's role in all of this.
Nicolas Loufrani:
Because Apple's role cannot be overstated. Their commitment to high-quality design and seamless integration of the keyboard for emojis into the iPhone were the catalysts that transformed emojis from a niche Japanese communication tool into a global mass-market phenomenon. They took existing concepts - many originating in the Western graphic emoticon tradition - and through their beautiful implementation, made emojis available to billions of users. Apple made my dream of a universal visual language possible at a scale I couldn't have achieved alone.
And the Unicode Consortium's achievement in creating a single interoperable standard definitively solved the "walled garden" problem that our toolbar had earlier addressed, providing the backbone for emojis to become truly universal. I'm grateful for what they accomplished. I just want the full history to be told accurately.
Smiley News:
That brings us to your decision to publish an academic paper. Why go to that length? Why not just a blog post or a press release?
Nicolas Loufrani:
Because the misinformation about who created what and when has become so deeply entrenched - in news articles, in Wikipedia, in AI training data, even in museum exhibitions - that a casual correction wouldn't be enough. When the Museum of Modern Art puts Kurita's emojis on display with a narrative that implies he invented the concept, that carries enormous weight. When every major news outlet repeats the same simplified origin story, it becomes the accepted truth. A blog post doesn't carry the same authority to challenge that.
An academic paper demands a different standard. It requires primary source evidence, precise dates, copyright registrations, systematic comparisons, and a theoretical framework that can be scrutinised by other researchers. Every claim in the paper can be verified. The dates are documented. The copyright registrations exist. The design comparisons are measurable. I wanted to create something that couldn't simply be dismissed as a company claiming credit - it had to be a rigorous historical document.
The paper draws on frameworks from semiotics - the study of signs and meaning - memetic theory from Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore, communication science, and design history. It traces the full evolutionary lineage from Scott Fahlman's 1982 ASCII emoticons through our graphic emoticons to modern standardised emojis, showing how specific design traits. The yellow colour, the 3D rendering, the visual metaphors, the categorisation were transmitted and adopted at each stage.
But beyond the comparison of historical archives from my company and the ones from various phone companies, the paper makes original academic contributions. I believe I'm the first to propose this thesis about the symbiosis between Eastern and Western traditions in creating emojis - that's never been articulated before. And I'm proposing an interesting validation of memetic theory applied to design history and to semiotics: showing how specific design traits replicate, mutate, and are selected across platforms and cultures, exactly as Dawkins and Blackmore predicted for cultural replicators. That's not just a company telling its story - it's a genuine contribution to how we understand the evolution of visual language.
