Emoji is the latest book from the Standards Manual design duo
Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth, the design duo behind the republished MTA, NASA, and EPA standards manuals, are back with a new book: Emoji, a collection of the original 176 emoji characters.
The original emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese telecommunications company DoCoMo in 1999 to use on pages in Japan. Those small, pixelated 12-by-12 grid images only bear a passing resemblance to today’s far more detailed emoji, but there’s a clear line that can be drawn between Kurita’s early work and the thousands of emoji characters on our phones. Kurita has been involved in the project; Reed and Smyth flew out to Tokyo to interview him for additional context on the original designs, and he’ll also be contributing an introduction…
