Emoji.
For some of us, it's a second language.
But did you know anyone can make an emoji?
You don't need funding.
You don't need to know someone on the inside.
You just need a really good 10-page paper.
Emoji is actually a Japanese word
that means "pictogram" or "pictograph."
SoftBank, a Japanese wireless carrier,
created the first known emoji set in 1997.
When Apple launched its iOS 2.2 in November 2008,
it had to create its own emoji
so any emoji sent from SoftBank customers
would show up on iPhones.
The company gave the task to three designers.
Angela Guzman: And so, when I was there,
I just openly asked,
"What is an emoji?"
And they told me, "Oh, it's like an illustration,
and you're gonna be drawing about 480 of them
with your mentor."
And I was like, "Oh, all right, well,
here I go for three months making these illustrations."
Narrator: Fast-forward to 2019.
Thousands of emoji have been added,
depictions of existing emoji have been changed,
and now anyone can propose an emoji.
The first step is to submit your proposal
to the Unicode Consortium.
It's a nonprofit organization
that sets the standard for how text
is represented and displayed
across various programs and pieces of software.
The Unicode Consortium deals
with about 50 emoji proposals a year.
That might not sound like a lot,
but it's because most of the proposals
don't even make it past the first round.
Why not?
Greg Welch: Well, you have to design an icon
that still looks like a redwood tree,
or whatever you're interested in,
even at extremely small size, because we use emoji in text.
And that's where a lot of proposals
just fall flat immediately.
Narrator: Proposers also need to make sure
their emoji align with Unicode's
13 mandatory selection factors,
turning their proposals into
10-page documents that include
an overall explanation of the emoji,
reasons why it's needed,
and data justifying its existence.
Sebastián Delmont: So if you want to have a strong proposal,
one, it should be an emoji that people will use frequently,
often, and that a large number of people will use.
Two, it has to be in that sweet spot
of being specific enough to warrant a separate image
and not general enough to be confused
with other things that are not that emoji.
Narrator: That's Sebastián Delmont.
He successfully proposed the flatbread emoji.
He's also an active member of Emojination,
a community of emoji enthusiasts
that helps get many emoji proposals approved,
like the hijab and the dumpling.
Once your proposal is ready,
you submit it to Unicode via email,
but the review process takes about a whole year.
Why so long?
Well, it needs to be approved
from different committees within Unicode.
Here's the journey your proposed emoji takes
after it's been submitted to Unicode.
First, the Emoji Subcommittee will review
and refine proposals with those who submitted them.
Some proposals may get rejected,
but proposals that do meet all the selection factors
will get passed to the Unicode Technical Committee.
This committee finalizes everything
that will go into the Unicode Standard,
like assigning a universal code for each emoji.
Six months in, the Draft Candidates list is created,
which lists all the emoji that will be moving forward.
Vendors including Google, Apple,
Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook
will all see the list and weigh in on the designs.
In the final three months,
Unicode's Common Locale Data Repository
will establish a name for the emoji
and record the name in languages other than English.
Finally, the last step: designing!
In the first quarter of the second year,
the final candidate list
will be sent to all the vendors to start designing.
Each vendor has their own style guide to follow.
Jennifer Daniel: Any time a designer starts an emoji,
they read the proposal, they look at the reference icons,
and they confer with experts on the subject.
For the case of the deaf emoji, we talked to
the CEO of the National Association of the Deaf.
We look at it very, very tiny and we say,
"OK, are those legible when they're small?"
And, of course, we try to anticipate
what other folks are doing,
which is why we talk to all of our friends
in the Emoji Subcommittee.
And that's sort of the process for an emoji.
Narrator: Once all the designs are finalized,
vendors will roll out the new emoji set,
usually around the time they update their operating systems.
Apple usually does it in the fall,
around the same time iOS gets updated.
From start to finish, it could take almost two years
before you see your emoji on your devices.
So, if you have an idea, start working on it now.
And pro tip: The best time to submit
is the beginning of each year.
Guzman: And when I came to the US,
I didn't speak the language,
but I ended up drawing stick figures
to sort of express my ideas and also be understood.
And so working on the emoji decades later
was really ironic, because it's kind of doing
that same thing of bridging those language barriers
and having everyone understand one another.
I think that's really beautiful.