Look Who’s Smiley Now: MoMA Acquires Original Emoji

Your phone has just become home to a tiny little collection of modern art.

On Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art announced that it had acquired the original set of 176 emoji for its permanent collection.

These glyphs, designed for pagers made by the Japanese mobile provider NTT DoCoMo and released in 1999, were the first pictographs to make their way into mobile communication. It would take another decade for emoji to explode into an American phenomenon, when Apple integrated its first emoji set for the iPhone in 2011. There are now nearly 2,000 standardized emoji.

The emoji we recognize now as the slick, round yellow smiley face was just a rudimentary line drawing back then, with a little rectangular box for a mouth and two carets for eyes. Looking back at old emoji feels a bit like trying to read pictographs from an ancient civilization. But look close enough, and you’ll find tantalizing hints about the assumptions embedded in modern online communication.

The original emoji, designed by Shigetaka Kurita, are each made within a grid that is just 12 pixels wide and 12 pixels long. First rendered in black and white, within a few years each emoji was painted one of six colors — black, red, orange, lilac, grass green and royal blue. Many of these symbols are illegible, their mysteries only revealed with the help of a translator. The red circle with three lines stands for “hot spring”; the amorphous purple blob, perhaps fittingly, translates to “art.” Others are stultifying in their literalness — simple digital translations of existing symbols. There are the 12 astrological signs, the four playing card suits, a “no smoking” symbol, a bathroom sign.