Paul D. Hunt

In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita created emoji - a simple set of 176 ‘picture characters’ [https://stories.moma.org/the-original-emoji-set-has-been-added-to-the-museum-of-modern-arts-collection-c6060e141f61] that were intended to send information to Japanese mobile phones in the form of 12×12 pixel monochrome icons alongside kanji [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji] or kana [https://en.