Emojis have become, without a doubt, a design classic. But how effective are they as a communication tool? We ask emoji inventor Shigetaka Kurita.

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 ...