NTT DoCoMo's 176 emoji (1999): tiny pictograms that became the world's first emoji set

In 1999, as NTT DoCoMo prepared to launch i-mode — the world's first mobile internet service — the phones themselves were almost impossibly limited: black-and-white screens that could display only 50 symbols, and no way to show pictures. Text messages were so short that recipients couldn't tell whether the sender was joking, angry or just terse. Engineer Shigetaka Kurita proposed a solution in the oldest Japanese tradition: use pictures as words.

Working with a tiny team, Kurita decided on a set of about 176 pictograms — faces, hearts, weather, transport, numbers — and had them drawn within the hardware's 12×12-dot grid. He took inspiration from weather-forecast symbols, manga's shorthand for emotions, and the pictograms created for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The constraints did the work: with so few pixels, each glyph had to carry exactly one idea, stripped to its simplest form.

The set was a hit. Emoji spread among Japanese teenagers, appeared on TV, and became a norm of everyday messaging. In the 2010s the format went global through the Unicode standard and smartphone keyboards, and in 2016 MoMA added the original 176 emoji to its permanent collection, calling them 'humble masterpieces' — a new form of global digital communication born from a 12×12-pixel limit.

Kurita later said the idea traced back to a pager heart symbol whose removal once caused a drop in sales — proof that the smallest visual could carry enormous meaning. The emoji he drew in 1999 are now part of everyday language worldwide.