Funding Friday: Emoji: NTT DOCOMO, Japan, 1999

I backed this project today. It’s amazing to see what emojis looked like when they first came out in 1999.

#crowdfunding

Comments (Archived):

  1. jason wright

    hieroglyphsp.s. ‘doko’ means ‘where?’, and with ‘mo’ means ‘everywhere’. the trivia of life.

    1. Lawrence Brass

      Then Xerox Parc, Steve Jobs, Susan Kare’s icons and fonts for the Macintosh. The initial unicode dingbats. It is a continuum. So is Emoji.Their initial simplicity is beautiful.

  2. Vendita Auto

    Reminded of all the image anchors cognitive to my reality I do not speak Mandarin but when considers the character/s ?

    1. jason wright

      50,000 character ‘alphabet’.how many emoji’s are there a present, and more importantly what do some of them even mean? sometimes i see one and i have no idea what the emotion is.

      1. sigmaalgebra

        So, you noticed!!!! Congratulations!!!!You noticed that for emoji’s and icons more generally, (A) can’t pronounce them, (B) can’t spell them, (C) can’t look them up in a dictionary, (D) can’t send/receive them as text, (E) can’t sort them into ascending order, (F) can’t use them as keys in a data base, (G) can’t use them in a search query, (H) can’t use them as words, phrases, or sentences, and (I) really have no good way to know what the heck they mean.We used to have icons. Some oriental languages still do. But Europe got the Roman alphabet, and that was a major step up in civilization.But some years ago some cognitive psychologists on bean bag chairs at Xerox PARC had some goofy ideas — ICONS!!!! Take us back 2000+ years, before the Romans, to, what, the pyramids?Then graphical user interface designers (GUIs) tried to use icons as a crucial part of GUIs — really big step back in civilization.On the Web pages of my startup, there are no icons — none, nichts, nil, nada, zip, zilch, zero. And there are no roll-overs. Instead, there are some links and push buttons, and each is just one or a few simple words in the Roman alphabet in English. E.g., for a link, there is “Help”.”Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty I’m free at last” of ICONS, etc.Yes, I’m sure the Xerox PARC’s people could dream up an icon that they like better than one word “Help”. Then those designers might be happy, but neither my users nor I would be!!!”What is this icon, the big, black X?””That’s what you rush to click on if you hear a loud knock at the door and suspect the FBI is about to grab your computer. The icon immediately deletes all your files and writes zeros all over all your disks.””Uh, I just clicked on that!!!””Sorry, guy. You DO have good, encrypted backups, right?”

      2. Vendita Auto

        No personal connection/s with emojis, images/scent a wonderful yes had my culture include characters kanji would my cognitive range senses been enlightened ? many meanings (rhyming) in any character but I think toooo late in my timeline for the anchors to be cognitive.

  3. BillMcNeely

    I can’t or don’t want to back every project I see each Friday so it’s been a least a month since I visited KS. I love the redesign