On July 17, the world celebrated National Emoji Day, yes. It’s a thing now. Emojis are morphing into a universal language of sorts and soon, 157 new emojis will join your smart device collection. These new emojis were approved for release by mid-2018 by the governing organization, Unicode bringing the grand total of emojis at our fingertips to 2,823.

New emojis coming soon include faces with different skin tones, hair types and colors including redheads and curly haired emojis and range from the practical to the quirky. New facial expressions include the partying face, pleading face and woozy face emojis. The swan, peacock, parrot and lobster also have their own emojis this year. 

Emojis are part of our collective lexicon and an emerging field of influential design that mixes psychology, pop culture, practical expression and commerce to come up with new symbols that communicate how we feel in ways that words simply can’t. 

It’s a genre of design that deserves respect and is gaining traction as a legit industry. Emojis are now referenced in the AP Stylebook, an authority on grammar, style and usage for journalists. 

Emojis are also gaining a lot of clout in commerce with cutting-edge brands incorporating emojis for search and purchase tasks. Google’s twitter handle now responds to emoji searches by simply tweeting an emoji to @Google and you’ll receive local search results related to the emoji.

Aficionados of this commonplace communication tool now celebrate World Emoji Day established in 2014, by  Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge. Emoji enthusiasts also have their own annual conference,  Emojicon that brings together speakers, guests and notable emoji figures who debate and explore topics such as the concept of Neuromoji— how emoji are changing the brain.

Emojis also have their own popularity contest where each year, emoji enthusiasts vote on their favorites. The 2018 Emoji of the Year is the ‘Thinking Face’ emoji.

The Best New Emoji goes to the ‘Exploding Head’ emoji

Most Anticipated Emoji goes to the ‘Lacrosse Stick and Ball’, coming to phones in late 2018.

Ever wonder how an emoji ends up on your smart device? It’s an interesting process to ponder. Behind the scenes, Unicode approves and sets the standard language for emoji code so that emojis are rendered across platforms like Android, iOS, Facebook, Samsung, and others. the Unicode Consortium handles the selection process with its members, including Google, Facebook, Huawei, and Netflix, voting on fresh symbols every year.

Once an emoji is approved, various platforms and vendors such as Google and Apple set out creating their interpretation of the animation using the data necessary to create their emoji fonts and code. These new emojis start showing up on mobile phones in August or September.

You can check out all of the new emojis for 2018 by clicking here: http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts-11.0/emoji-released.html

These images are just samples: vendors for mobile phones, PCs, and web platforms will typically use images that fit their overall emoji designs.

If you would like to take a crack at designing your own emoji, there is a process to follow outlined by Unicode for new emoji proposals 

Now here are some fun facts according to Word Emoji Day:

By mid-2015, half of all comments on Instagram included an emoji

The most used emoji on Twitter is Face With Tears of Joy according to

More than 700M emojis are used in Facebook posts every day

Over 900M emojis are sent every day without text on Facebook Messenger

Another interesting factoid, July 17th marks World Emoji Day because that is the date famously displayed on the calendar emoji: 

In 1999, the first emoji appeared in Japan, the creation of Shigetaka Kurita who worked at the Japanese telecommunications company NTT DOCOMO. Almost a decade later, emojis made their way into cell phones in the US. In 2010, emojis were incorporated into Unicode, the standard that governs the software coding of text. That year, Unicode released 722 emoji on both iPhone and Android.

Everyone has their personal favorite. Mine is the Meh face but with the latest crop of emojis coming out, I suspect I’ll be partial to the partying face. What’s your favorite emoji? Leave a comment at the bottom of the blog post to share with our readers.

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