July 17 is World Emoji Day. According to National Today, this annual unofficial holiday validates our obsession with these cute graphic icons. Due to emojis, communication has expanded far beyond ...

When Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji in 1999, he had to work within a grid measuring 12 by 12 pixels. That’s a total of 144 dots, or 18 bytes of data, meaning that the Japanese designer’s ...

Can you imagine a world where you text without emojis? Here’s how it all started. Japanese characters, or "kanji," are largely based on Chinese ideograms, whose writing system is already highly ...