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July 17, 2021 Today is emoji day, which falls every year on July 17 and recalls the invention of the Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita, considered the father of the pictograms that later became commonly used.
Over 20 years ago, Kurita created a set of 176 emojis using a 12x12 pixel grid.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibits Kurita's original emoji set.
According to Emojipedia, a website that collects and catalogs all emojis, 217 new icons have been released this year.
The most loved emoji by Italians is that of the kiss with 41.4% of preferences, followed by laughter with tears (40.9%) and thumbs up (29.7%). These are the results of a survey conducted on the occasion of Emoji Day, which is celebrated as every year on July 17. The initiative was born in 2014 from the idea of Jeremy Burge, an emoticon historian and founder of Emojipedia, a website that collects and catalogs all the emojis. The smileys have now entered all our conversations and even in some literary and cinematographic experiments.
According to the research, carried out by Samsung, the largest users of emojis are women aged between 35 and 44, living in the North-East and South of Italy.
The survey also highlighted how the pandemic has affected the habits of use of emojis and led to the search for new symbols that can express the situation or the restart. In fact, in recent months, a series of technology companies have launched themed emoticons: from the syringe of Apple's anti-Covid vaccine to that of Twitter that raised awareness on hand washing to that of Facebook that depicted a hug.