For a little while, the colourful faces and images infiltrating text messages and online communications could be dismissed as a phase among the internet-addled younger generations.
But when the Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop took part in an emoji-only interview, she confirmed the quirky communications had hit the mainstream.
The letter-sized images of everything from facial expressions to animals and activities were created in Japan in 1999 as local telcos struggled to process the growing number of images or photographs people were sending via texts.
After Shigetaka Kurita, the designer behind the original set, failed to copyright the first set of emojis, they took off across the world with Apple and Google installing their own emoji keyboards in 2011. Since then, their popularity has soared; the basic smiling-face emoji has been used more than 2 million times, the red heart 2.9 billion. And that's just on Twitter.
Facial expressions and heart emojis have been part of the collection from the beginning and visual communications experts say the rapid uptake is partly powered by their emotional potency. Samantha Edwards-Vandenhoek, a lecturer in digital and social visual communications at Swinburne University, says emojis are an effective way to add tone and zest to text-based communications.
"While they look gaudy and perhaps a bit naive, emojis offer an effective way to show how we feel without having to talk about it," she says.
Edwards-Vandenhoek says emojis are likely to be with us for good because they transcend language barriers. What's more,communicating with pictures is hardwired into human brains. This sort of communication has been going on longer than humans have been literate, she says, "even back to Paleolithic times through cave paintings".
The first true pictograms are thought to have been used as early as 9000BC to represent food, warmth or shelter. Pictograms are believed to be the basis of one of the world's earliest written languages, Egypt's hieroglyphics.
Communication through pictures hascome a long way in the last 2.5 million years; we now have more than 30 facial expressions, many of which are also available as cat faces.
The collection we see on our screens is carefully managed by a global not-for-profit organisation including Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. The Unicode Consortium watches over a list of more than 110,000 symbols, of which about 1000 are emojis. Each coded entry includes a brief description to ensure emojis will essentially have the same meaning regardless of which device they are viewed on.
It mostly works, but a few have slightly different tones depending on how the software company interprets the description. For example, the "dancing person" emoji appears as a female flamenco dancer on Apple devices but a male Saturday Night Fever-style dancer on Android.
The Unicode collection has been updated many times but it is not easy to get an emoji into the official set. It involves public consultation and polls; essentially an emoji must be proved to be missing from the collection, and already in extensive use.
But they're clearly an open-minded group. The current set includes two different alien heads, three options for cable cars, and a surprisingly frequently used smiling poo.
The most recent update in 2014 saw 37 new emojis added to the line-up. These included tacos and unicorns, as well as several religious or cultural symbols, including a mosque and a synagogue. Most tech companies last year alsobegan offering diverse skin colours for many of the facial expression images.
Submissions are already open for the next update. Martin Tomitsch, who teaches design computing at the University of Sydney, believes the collection will keep growing for years to come. "Emojis will continue to evolve, as will how we use them," he says. "They are part of a cultural revolution changing how we communicate."
Designers – and the technology companies they work for – are keen to encourage emoji uptake as it leads directly to increased use of their products. "Emojis make it easier and more enjoyable to communicate, so you'll send more messages, tweets and emails," Tomitsch says.
Most smartphones now include a set of several hundred emojis, making inserting one, two or ten into a message as simple as a few clicks. Tomitsch has already seen prototypes for desktop computer keyboards that display frequently used emojis rather than letters at the flick of a switch.
While a keyboard may be a few months away, emojis have already spawned their own social network with 60,000 users. Launched six months ago by English developers Matt Gray and Tom Scott, Emojli users communicate only in emojis, even for their usernames.
"We had the idea at about the same time but we weren't sold on it until we realised that usernames should be emoji too. At that point, we burst out laughing and realised we had to build it," Gray says.
The pair have no plans to commercialise the online community; it wascreated as a joke, but ittook off.
"It's just for fun," Gray says, "just like emojis."
