How EmojiEmoji
A Japanese word (絵文字) meaning 'picture character' — small graphical symbols used in digital communication to express ideas, emotions, and objects. Designs Have Changed Over the Years: A Visual History
If you sent a 😂 in 2012, the image that appeared on your friend's screen looked dramatically different from what it looks like today. The evolution of emoji design over the past decade-plus is not just an aesthetic story — it's a history of technology, culture, corporate competition, and shifting social norms rendered in tiny pictograms.
The Origins: Docomo's 176 Pixels
The first widely deployed emoji were designed in 1999 by Shigetaka KuritaShigetaka Kurita
Japanese artist who created the first emoji set — 176 12x12 pixel designs for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service in 1999. for NTT Docomo, Japan's largest mobile carrier. They were 12x12 pixel grids — primitive by any modern standard, but revolutionary as communication tools. The original 176 emoji were practical: weather symbols, transportation icons, clock faces, and a small set of expressive faces that established the visual vocabulary we still use today.
These earliest emoji were not designed to be aesthetically beautiful. They were designed to be functional within severe technical constraints. The 😊 at 12x12 pixels is barely a face — a handful of dark dots on a grid — but it worked.
When the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired Kurita's original 176 emoji designs in 2016, it was a formal recognition that these humble pixelated icons constituted a design achievement significant enough for permanent cultural preservation.
2010–2013: The Western Debut and Early Platform Wars
When Apple included an emoji keyboard as a hidden feature in iOS 2.2 (2008) and then prominently in iOS 5 (2011), Western users encountered emoji for the first time at scale. Apple's emoji designs were a significant aesthetic leap from the Docomo originals — rounded, colorful, with a pseudo-3D "bubble" quality that became the template for what many people still think of as "the way emoji look."
The original Apple emojiApple Emoji
Apple's proprietary emoji designs used across iOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, known for their detailed, skeuomorphic style. set was iconic but also limited in representation and occasionally peculiar. The information desk person 💁 with her hand flip, the dancer 💃 in her red dress, the man in a business suit levitating 🕴️ — these characters had a specific visual style rooted in the early 2010s Apple design language of glossy skeuomorphism.
Google's early Android emoji were notably cruder — flat, slightly cartoonish, and with a distinctly different aesthetic from Apple's rounded lushness. Samsung developed its own interpretations, often with even more stylized proportions. Microsoft's early Windows Phone emoji leaned into a flat, almost clip-art aesthetic.
This divergence meant that the same UnicodeUnicode
Universal character encoding standard that assigns a unique number to every character across all writing systems and symbol sets, including emoji. character could look completely different depending on the device — and this platform variation has been a defining feature of emoji since the beginning.
2014–2016: The Diversity Revolution and Design Overhaul
Two things happened simultaneously in this period that reshaped emoji design fundamentally.
Skin tone modifiers arrived. Unicode 8.0 in 2015 introduced the Fitzpatrick skin tone scale as emoji modifiers. For the first time, 👋 hand wave could be 👋🏻👋🏼👋🏽👋🏾👋🏿 — five different skin tones plus the original yellow default. Apple, Google, and other vendors had to redesign every human character with five additional variants. This was not merely a color-swap exercise — each skin tone had to look natural and intentional at emoji scale, which required genuine design work.
Apple's 2014 redesign also moved toward a flatter, more iOS 7-compatible aesthetic across its emoji set. The pseudo-3D bubble quality of earlier emoji gave way to cleaner, more illustrative designs. Many emoji that had specific, odd details in earlier versions were simplified or redesigned.
The great gun debate. 🔫 The pistol emoji was designed as a realistic revolver across most platforms until 2016. Apple replaced its realistic gun with a bright green water pistol, triggering a cascade: Google, Samsung, Twitter, and eventually Microsoft all followed suit with toy gun designs. This coordinated shift — driven by social pressure around gun violence — was the first prominent case of platform vendors collectively redesigning emoji for social rather than aesthetic reasons. The realistic pistol is now essentially extinct in mainstream emoji sets.
2017–2019: 3D, Detail, and Social Expansion
Apple's major emoji redesigns in this period introduced significantly more detail and a quasi-3D quality to many characters. Food emoji got elaborate shading and texture. Animal emoji gained naturalistic fur and feather rendering. The 🥑 avocado, 🦊 fox, and 🥐 croissant arrivals showed how far emoji design had come from 12-pixel grids.
Google's 2017 Android 8.0 redesign was arguably more dramatic: the company retired its quirky "blob" emoji — rounded, teardrop-shaped face characters with distinctive personalities — and replaced them with the circular, yellow-faced design that had become standard across other platforms. The blob emoji are now nostalgically beloved. 🟡 vsVariation Selector (VS)
Unicode characters (VS-15 U+FE0E and VS-16 U+FE0F) that modify whether a character renders in text (monochrome) or emoji (colorful) presentation. 🫐-shaped: the change was significant enough that fans petitioned for the blobs' return.
Facebook and WhatsApp developed distinct emoji styles during this period, further fragmenting the design landscape. Facebook's emoji had a flat, illustrative quality distinct from Apple's more 3D approach. WhatsApp's emoji sit between the two.
2020–2022: Pandemic Additions and Continuous Refinement
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered the rapid adoption of 😷 mask-wearing face and increased attention to medical and hygiene emoji. Unicode 13.0 in 2020 added 🫁 lungs, 💉 syringe (immediately adopted for vaccine representation alongside its existing uses), and a range of emotionally nuanced faces.
Platform vendors continued evolving their designs. Apple made notable changes to its syringe emoji to remove blood from the needle — a direct design response to the emoji being used to represent COVID vaccines in a context where the bloody original design was sending an unintentionally alarming message.
The 🧑 gender-neutral person emoji, introduced in Unicode 12.0 (2019) but iterated on in subsequent releases, prompted ongoing design discussions about how to represent gender neutrality visually without defaulting to either masculine or feminine presentation cues. Different platforms answered this question differently, with results ranging from convincing androgyny to designs that clearly read as one gender.
The Apple-Google Convergence and Remaining Divergence
Over the past few years, Apple and Google emoji have converged aesthetically more than at any previous point. Both now use circular yellow faces with similar proportions, both invest heavily in detailed, naturalistic food and animal rendering, and both have adopted similar principles for human character design.
But meaningful differences remain. Apple's emoji tend toward slightly higher polish and more detailed shading. Google's lean slightly simpler and more graphic. Samsung's Galaxy emoji have their own character — often with slightly different facial expressions on the same codepoint. Microsoft's Windows 11 emoji redesign introduced a softer, more pastel aesthetic that distinguishes it noticeably from Apple and Google.
Twitter/X, Meta platforms, and major messaging apps maintain their own implementations, each with visual identities that have evolved separately.
What Changes in Emoji Design Tell Us
The evolution of emoji design is a Rorschach test for broader cultural changes:
- The gun → water pistol shift reflects how companies respond to social pressure around violence
- Skin tone expansion reflects belated acknowledgment of non-white default assumptions in technology
- Gender-neutral characters reflect ongoing normative shifts around gender
- Disability emoji reflect disability rights advocacy finally reaching technology design
- The food emoji arms race (increasingly photorealistic produce) reflects tech companies competing on the fine details of lifestyle and aspiration
Each redesign cycle is also a business decision. Emoji are marketed features — Apple highlights emoji updates in iOS release notes, knowing that emoji are a significant engagement driver for users.
Explore More on EmojiFYI
Our comparison tool lets you see exactly how any emoji looks across all major platforms — a living archive of the design differences that make emoji culture so fascinating.