EMOJI HEAVEN, OR HELL?

Today is World Emoji Day. Why? Because that’s the date shown on Apple’s iCal emoji. The day (in 2002) that the calendar application was announced. Here’s the calendar emojis from Apple, Google and Twitter, which uses the date that it was founded.

Since they first appeared on Japanese phones in the late 1990s, emojis have risen to clearly become (numerically-speaking) number one in the world of visual communication. Billions are used every day. “Emoji” means “pictogram” in Japanese. Surprisingly, the connection to the English words “emotion”and “emoticon” is coincidental. There are 1,144 separate emoji components in Unicode 10, and many other emojis are composed by putting two or more together.

If you want to improve your emoji knowledge, Emojipedia is the place: https://emojipedia.org

It’s all happening in the world of cute little icons. There’s an emoji movie coming out next week.

(The Emoji Movie © Sony Pictures Entertainment)

The most popular emoji is “Tears of Joy.” Below are the Apple and Samsung versions.

We can already search with emojis, and now the big brands are ramping up their emoji-friendliness. These are for Coca-Cola and IKEA.

As the travel website, KAYAK stated: “Spelling things is so 2015.” The site can already be searched using these ten emojis to represent cities, and they’ve just had a competition to choose 15 more.

Truth Facts give their take on the way that things are going.

Nigel Holmes wrote an excellent post about emojis (and other developments in visual language) earlier this year: https://www.johngrimwade.com/blog/2017/02/20/emojis-and-beyond/