The first emojis were born from a practical need. In 1999, Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita, working for telecom giant NTT Docomo, crafted the initial set of 176 characters to convey information quickly on early mobile screens. These simple 12x12 pixel images covered weather, traffic, and emotions. Their path to global dominance came in 2010 when the Unicode Consortium—an industry standards group whose members include Apple, Google, and Microsoft—formally adopted them. This single technical mo