The Dinosaur Emoji πŸ¦•

A story about communication, technology, evolution & dinosaurs.

Prologue

Note: This article uses a lot of emojis. If you see boxes and question marks ⍰ instead of colourful images, you may need to update your operating system.

—

I was on the πŸš‹ tram, on my way home. I wanted to reply to a WhatsApp message and was scrolling through the emoji list, when I noticed there was no dinosaur. How was I supposed to express my feelings?

Then I started thinking: What exactly are emojis, anyway? Where do they come from, who makes them, and have I – at the ripe age of 31 – finally lost touch with the technology of the young people, that I don't know such things?1

And that's how it all started.

Prologue from Prehistory

19 September 1982, the Internet

Scott Fahlman is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, and what he really, desperately needs is an »irony marker«. In his faculty's digital message board, people write about everything: from serious academic discussions to what today you might call »internet humour« – and the posts in the latter category are slowly getting out of hand2.

The problem: Not everyone recognises the sometimes ironic comments, and so numerous discussions escalate because somebody among the readers takes the text at face value3. Fahlman and his colleagues therefore propose – also not entirely seriously – that jokes should from now on be marked with a symbol.

Various ideas4 are discussed, and at some point Fahlman realises that the combination of a colon, a hyphen and a closing bracket looks almost like a smiley lying on its side. A perfect irony marker!

From then on, the success of these character combinations – later christened »emoticons« – is unstoppable. Through American university networks, not only :-) spreads, but countless other, sometimes very cryptic combinations5 emerge as well.

The critics are quick to arrive. A well-written text, so the frequent argument goes, needs no indicator pointing out the humour. And it is Fahlman himself who, 20 years later, will write:

»Perhaps the E-mail smiley face has done more to degrade our written communication than to improve it.«

The History of Emoji

The history of emoji begins in the late 1990s πŸ“± in the Far East. While in Germany mobile phones are still almost unthinkable, in Japan mobile calling – and shortly after, mobile browsing – is already part of everyday life.

The mobile phones and pagers πŸ“Ÿ of that generation are simple; at this point we are still more than a decade away from the first iPhone. Written short communication is gaining popularity at a dizzying pace, but at the same time it poses a challenge for Japanese communication, which is traditionally rich in imagery.

There is no room in short messages for the long, formal and flowery salutations – or it is simply too cumbersome to type them out. Small images πŸ–ΌοΈ could help to better convey the sender's intent.

Shigetaka Kurita7 πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» is in those years an employee at DoCoMo, one of Japan's large mobile phone companies. At this point, mobile phones don't yet have access to the real Internet 🌐; instead, each telecom provider builds its own portals – i-mode is the name of the best-known such system8, and Kurita works on it.

He convinces the device manufacturers πŸ“± – Sharp, Panasonic, Fujitsu – to include a set of symbols. Sure, they can do that, Kurita is told, but he should please deliver the finished symbols himself.

Which he did. 176 symbols make up the original emoji set, each one 12 by 12 pixels – barely large enough to depict anything at all. To store the glyphs, unused space in »Shift JIS«9 was used, a character encoding for Japanese script πŸ‡―πŸ‡΅.

Emoji in Japan

Despite the crude rendering: These emojis were a gigantic success. Suddenly being able to see little pictures in a text message felt more like »THE FUTURE!« πŸš€ than anyone could have ever imagined. Today, this first emoji set hangs in the MoMA. Kurita is probably one of the very few business school graduates to have ever made it into the MoMA.

DoCoMo's success led to competitors (AU and today's SoftBank) implementing their own emoji sets into their proprietary operating systems. Some symbols were adopted, some new πŸ†• ones were added. And even within DoCoMo's own product range, character encodings quickly fell »out of sync«.

The storage slots for the symbols were, depending on the device and software version, effectively double-booked. With the effect that when two devices communicated, either no symbol was displayed at all – or an entirely different one than intended. Instead of πŸ’š the recipient might suddenly see ☠️10. It took many more years – until 2006 – before harmonisation began.

Expansion into the World

By now, emojis had become so popular in Japan πŸ‡―πŸ‡΅ that Google, in 2007, saw no chance of a successful Gmail launch in Japan unless they too implemented emojis in their product.

But the incompatibility problem between the character sets remained. The provider-specific versions made it necessary to create mapping tables πŸ—‚οΈ – that is, to define which symbol from provider A corresponds to which symbol from provider B. And which »fallback« emoji to display when there was no equivalent.

A lot of work. Too much work, in fact, so Google (ultimately with success11) pushed12 for the Unicode Consortium to take on this task and harmonise emojis within Unicode βœ….

Excursus: Unicode & the Unicode Consortium

Unicode is an IT standard and part of ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) with the goal of digitising every written character of every known culture13. The universal character set of humankind, if you will – and the reason why even on, say, American computers, peculiar characters like umlauts Γ€ or accent aigu Γ© can be displayed.

But the digitisation goes beyond contemporary writing systems; even historical characters πŸ“œ up to and including hieroglyphs: Wikipedia14 are or will become part of ISO. The Unicode 10.0 standard encompasses 136,690 characters.

Unicode is managed by the Unicode Consortium ⚜️, a non-profit organisation of the large (US) software companies: Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, HP and many more. This consortium decides what becomes part of Unicode – and what does not15.

Emoji Design

If emojis have been harmonised through Unicode, then how come they look different πŸ€·β€β™€οΈ on every device?

The different emoji designs across platforms (l. to r.): Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Twitter
The different emoji designs across platforms (l. to r.): Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, Twitter

Because Unicode describes a concept rather than an exact design. You can think of it roughly like this: The letter »L« is essentially a horizontal line meeting a vertical line. That is the concept πŸ’‘.

This concept can be interpreted in many ways through typefaces and font styles: serifs (or not), stroke weight, cap height, character width and much more. Every L in every typeface looks different πŸ”€. The same applies to emojis. Each of the major platforms maintains its own emoji fonts, which sometimes follow the Unicode description more closely, sometimes less so.

The hamburger and gun emojis across version numbers.
The hamburger and gun emojis across version numbers.

On the one hand, this allows artistic freedom 🎨 and emoji designs tailored to a specific audience. On the other hand, it only works if the manufacturers actually stick to the Unicode Consortium's guidelines. Supposed design details can cause major differences in meaning.

Even within a single vendor's versions, emojis evolve over time. A harmless example is the Apple hamburger πŸ”, which in version 11.0 was given a lettuce leaf and a tomato. It gets problematic with the gun emoji. Here, Apple – presumably with good intentions – unilaterally replaced the weapon with a children's toy16. None of the other vendors followed suit, and so my harmless summer party emojis suddenly take on a rather different meaning on the recipient's Android device.

The Dinosaur Emoji

So, let's summarise: Emojis are pictograms or ideograms – not unlike letters – that are systematised within the Unicode system, which in turn is managed by an IT tech consortium. But how do I actually get my dinosaur emoji? πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ

Proposing Emojis

I probably should have seen this coming πŸ™„: Where there are interests, there are interest groups. Where there are interest groups, there are associations. Where there is an association, there are committees. And so it is almost not surprising that the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee17 exists.

Or to put it in Unicode's own words: »The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee is a subcommittee of the Unicode Technical Committee operating under the Technical Committee Procedures«. And if you want something from a committee, you first have to fill out a form πŸ“.

In theory, anyone can submit an Emoji Proposal πŸ“‹, but the criteria for adding new emojis are more or less clearly defined18, and you need a compelling, data-driven argument.

At this point I am definitively convinced: The world needs a dinosaur emoji. And of course it has to be the best of all dinosaur species – a sauropod19! Surely I can come up with a good argument for that. ✊

Selection Criteria

If you want to submit an emoji proposal πŸ“, you need to answer the following questions, among others:

Is the proposed emoji expected to be used very frequently πŸ“ˆ?

It helps to be able to demonstrate that it is by no means just a local or temporary phenomenon. In my proposal, I therefore point to 150 years of dinosaur euphoria, from the Bone Wars20 all the way to Jurassic Park 🎬.

Moreover, the committee itself suggests using Instagram πŸ“Έ and Google Trends to check search volume for the respective topic. Said and done: among the animals already available as emojis, the dinosaur would at the time of the proposal rank 27th (out of 74) of the most-used hashtags – a good argument.

And Google Trends πŸ“Š also speaks in favour of a dinosaur emoji:

πŸ“Š Google Trends: Dinosaur vs. Shark, Lion, Dolphin, Elephant (2008–2018) β†’

Is the proposed emoji expected to be used in many different ways and on multiple levels of meaning πŸ”€?

Here, too, everything speaks in favour of the dinosaur: In numerous cultures, the word dinosaur does not only refer to the animal, but also carries a metaphorical meaning of »something outdated«22. This point also speaks particularly in favour of a sauropod as the appropriate representative for the dinosaurs πŸ¦• – with a T-Rex emoji, this metaphor simply would not work.

In addition, various exclusion criteria are checked, such as »Is your proposal a deity?« or »Is your proposal a trademark?« – two things that can under no circumstances ❌ become an emoji.

Finally, I attach two design mockups 🎨 to my proposal23, one in black and white and one in colour.

The submitted design as an attachment to my emoji proposal.
The submitted design as an attachment to my emoji proposal.

Submit. And then – after months of research – wait ⏳. For a long time. New emojis are added to the standard only once a year, and the emoji committee meets once per quarter.

#DinosaurEmoji

In the meantime, I am not sitting idle. If there is one thing the Internet has, it is surely thousands of sauropod fans. To reach them πŸ“£, the companion website dinosauremoji.com goes live in spring. A timeline documents the current state of affairs.

Of course, the Internet immediately corrected me: chickens are technically dinosaurs too. My mistake!
Of course, the Internet immediately corrected me: chickens are technically dinosaurs too. My mistake!

The Washington Post catches wind of the website and a wonderful πŸ—žοΈ article is published.

Let's not beat around the bush: I am really, genuinely thrilled about this article in the Washington Post.
Let's not beat around the bush: I am really, genuinely thrilled about this article in the Washington Post.

And the Natural History Museum London also tweets 🐦 about #DinosaurEmoji:

Randall Munroe πŸ€“ makes an alt-text gag referencing another dinosaur emoji proposal24 that was submitted several weeks after mine, in which the term »Brontosaurus« is used:

»I'm excited about the proposal to add a
»I’m excited about the proposal to add a „brontosaurus“ emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.«

And last but not least: hundreds of stickers and temporary tattoos πŸ¦• find enthusiastic takers.

#Repost @felixbeilharz ・・・ #dinosauremoji

Ein Beitrag geteilt von DinosaurEmoji (@dinosauremoji) am

Epilogue

In November 2016, 8 months after my submission, the dinosaur emoji is officially accepted as a candidate for Unicode 10.0 πŸŽ‰. More precisely: the sauropod is accepted, and additionally – based on another proposal – a T-Rex.

On 20 June 2017, Unicode 10.0 is officially released 🎊25, but it takes another four months before the individual providers actually update their emoji fonts.

In October 2017, the time has come: Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft have the sauropod in their systems. Around two and a half billion πŸ“± mobile users (and of course all desktop users too) can now – with their next software update – finally express their dinosaur feelings properly.

L. to r.: The sauropod emoji as implemented by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook and Twitter.
L. to r.: The sauropod emoji as implemented by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook and Twitter.

πŸ¦•

That was fun!

—
On a personal note: Over the past two years, I have been asked so many times to tell the story of #DinosaurEmoji that this article now also exists in presentation form. So if you would like to book me for your Christmas party keynote as a Robert Langdon stand-in, please get in touch: [email protected].

  1. In truth, the technological aspect was really what drove me to pursue this further. As a (hobby) web developer, it annoyed me greatly that I no longer understood a part of internet technology. I would like to push back the moment when that inevitably happens as far into the future as possible. ↩

  2. http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/25-jahre-seitwaerts-smiley-ich-bin-a-498428.html ↩

  3. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm ↩

  4. http://newsticker.sueddeutsche.de/ ↩

  5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons ↩

  6. Character encoding for beginners: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-what-is-encoding.de ↩

  7. https://www.theverge.com/ ↩

  8. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode ↩

  9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS ↩

  10. This was quite intentional, by the way. Closed systems ensured that nobody in a friend group would switch to a different mobile provider. It also created competition between them. Which provider has the best emojis? «If you want the green heart, you have to switch to us!» ↩

  11. https://opensource.googleblog.com/ ↩

  12. The original wiki, sadly riddled with 404 pages today, though much still works: https://sites.google.com/. The initial document dates from August 2007 and is titled »Working Draft Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols«: http://www.unicode.org/. And here you can still see the original KDDI emojis: http://unicode.org/ ↩

  13. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode ↩

  14. Unicodeblock Γ„gyptische Hieroglyphen ↩

  15. Here is one of my favourite threads from the early days: https://groups.google.com/ ↩

  16. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/pistole-als-emoji-apple-macht-aus-dem-revolver-eine-wasserpistole/13994676.html, https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ ↩

  17. »Meet the shadowy overlords who approve emojis«: latimes.com ↩

  18. http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html ↩

  19. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauropoden ↩

  20. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars ↩

  21. https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/dinosaure ↩

  22. https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dinosaurier ↩

  23. With generous support from Chris Struwe of https://pooliestudios.com/ ↩

  24. http://unicode.org/L2/L2016/16072-jurassic-emoji.pdf ↩

  25. https://emojipedia.org/unicode-10.0/ ↩

Did you enjoy reading this article?