Emoji Timeline

A timeline of cultural and technical events in the history of emoji

Sentiments of Emojis

As part of a school assignment designer Allwin Williams creates the project “Sentiment of Emojis“, which visualises the real-time emoji sentiment of Twitter using data from Matthew Rothenberg’s Emoji Tracker. A lot of sentiments are expressed through emojis and they are easier to decode, for humans as well as computers.This is an exploration on filtering … Continued

Smiley on the Parliament

On World Emoji Day, July 17th, a lipstick-wearing smiley is beamed onto the Houses of Parliament in London, United Kingdom. Behind the projection is makeup brand Ciaté London who has partnered with SmileyWorld Ltd, who owns the copyright for the smiley face in most of the world. The image projected is therefore one of the … Continued

Apple Introduces Emoji Search in iOS 14

At their yearly Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, Apple announces the upcoming release of iOS 14, their operating system for the iPhone. One of the new features is adding an emoji search to the keyboard. A new search field for the emoji keyboard lets you search for the perfect emoji. Enter a commonly used word or … Continued

Facebook Adds Care Reaction

Facebook adds a seventh “reaction” button on its platform, shows a heart being hugged by an emoji. It sits next to the other five reactions, introduced four years earlier, and the original thumbs up: like, heart, LOL, wow, sadness and anger. The new reaction is intended as shorthand for the 2 billion global users to … Continued

Emojis Are Used to Battle Covid-19 Censors

Users on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app, evades censors by translating a viral interview about covid-19 from the March edition of the local state-run magazine, People, into emojis. The interview is with Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department of Wuhan Central Hospital. Ai was the first doctor to pass along information about the … Continued

Emoji Kitchen

Google releases an update to its emoji keyboard called Emoji Kitchen allowing Gboard users on Android to create certain emoji mashups, with the results suggested in the keyboard for input as a sticker. Each of the stickers are specially handcrafted by the designers at Google. Emoji have been around long enough that people want to … Continued

Emoji Trends

As a side project, Enric Moreu creates Emoji Trends by using a Twitter scrape of around 800 GB of tweets containing emojis. Enric wanted a “language agnostic” way to see what was happening around the world by creating charts of how often different emojis were used. His goal isn’t that the charts are to be … Continued

Emoji Mashup Bot

The Twitter account Emoji Mashup Bot is created by 18-year-old developer Louan Bengmah. Louan, who is studying web development in France, runs the account which creates and tweets a randomized mashup of two different emoji every 60 min. “I thought making a Twitter bot would be a fun exercise. So I watched some great YouTube … Continued

Facebook and Instagram bans ‘sexual’ emoji

In July, Facebook and Instagram updates the Facebook Community Standards regarding permissible sexual expression on the social media platforms. Under the new terms using “Suggestive Elements” such as “contextually specific and commonly sexual emojis or emoji strings” isn’t allowed anymore and may result in a user’s account being flagged or removed. The Facebook Community Standards … Continued

Picture Character – An Emoji Documentary

The world premiere of Picture Character – An Emoji Documentary is held at the Tribeca Film Festival, New York, on April 28th. The tagline on the poster is “Everything you ever wanted to know about emoji”. The film is directed by Ian Cheney & Martha Shane, and produced by Jennifer 8. Lee, of Emoji Nation, … Continued