Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Former Apple Intern Looks Back at Designing First Apple Emoji in 2008

MacRumors

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
68,196
38,988



Back in 2008, Angela Guzman was a graphic design student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an intern at Apple, where she joined the iPhone team and worked alongside another Apple designer, Raymond, to come up with the first 500 emoji characters that were available on the iPhone.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of her internship, Guzman has taken a look back at her time at Apple and her work on emoji in an interesting retrospective shared on Medium.

emoji2008-800x646.jpg
Image via Angela Guzman​

When Guzman was handed the emoji project at Apple, it came at a time when emoji were unfamiliar in the English speaking world. Guzman received a crash course in Apple design and then started designing emoji, which featured incredible detail even right from the start. Then Apple CEO Steve Jobs reviewed each batch of emoji before it was approved for launch.
Regardless of how fast I could crank one out, I constantly checked the details: the direction of the woodgrain, how freckles appeared on apples and eggplants, how leaf veins ran on a hibiscus, how leather was stitched on a football, the details were neverending. I tried really hard to capture all this in every pixel, zooming in and zooming out, because every detail mattered.
Click to expand...
Some emoji, says Guzman, have interesting back stories. The happy poop swirl, for example, was reused as the top of the ice cream cone. Harder, more detailed emoji were left last, such as the now-iconic dancer with the red dress.

Guzman's emoji were first launched in Japan in November of 2008, and in the time since then, emoji have changed the way we communicate. Emoji have become an important part of the iOS and macOS ecosystem, and Apple has continued refining and improving its emoji offerings with each Unicode update.

As with the first Apple emoji designed by Guzman and her partner Raymond, emoji today feature incredible detail thanks to the talented artists at Apple who take the time to make sure each and every pixel is perfect.

iOS 11.1 was the last iOS update that introduced new emoji, bringing Unicode 10 characters like crazy face, pie, pretzel, t-rex, vampire, exploding head, face vomiting, shushing face, love you gesture, brain, scarf, zebra, giraffe, fortune cookie, pie, hedgehog, and more.

ios11emoji1-800x392.jpg

The next emoji update will come with the release of Unicode 11 in 2018, and emoji proposals for that update include smiling face with three hearts, blue face with icicles, smiling face with cape, mango, cupcake, kangaroo, llama, peacock, and red hair options for existing emoji.

Article Link: Former Apple Intern Looks Back at Designing First Apple Emoji in 2008
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2018/01/11/2008-emoji-design-retrospective/
  • Like
Reactions: jjm3
I must say I’m happy Apple got rid of the gloss. I always thought it was fugly. I don’t need thinks to look like they’re covered in a coat of varnish.

1*8N0Sa1lCMN2viF6LY2nRGA.png
 
  • Like
Reactions: Avieshek and ILikeAllOS
Is there an emoji that represents the feeling you have when 45 minutes later, you go back to check on your download in documents6 that should of only taken 5 minutes to begin with, only to realize it stopped downloading because you decided to play around in the browser at same time?
 
  • Like
Reactions: MorganHiller
I just got a new Punkt MP01, mostly to get away from watching society deteriorate from a digital window to infinity.

Not having to look at emoji anymore is certainly a bonus. I was inspired by this because I’ve watched my friend’s ability to communicate their feelings go from, “amazing,” to, “null,” over the past 5 years or so.

Sad. We’re going back to an age of pictographs.
 
  • Like
Reactions: lanceh5, WatchFromAfar, mburkhard and 2 others
Good, now I know who to I will address hate-mail...

In all seriousness, design is hard and I'm sure these were challenging as it's a new paradigm of communication and while unicode is setting that xxxxxxx = smiley poop, bringing text to life is very hard and these are universally understood and transcend language barriers and even culture.

However, I hate emoji. I block people who use and I won't participate. I also don't really use iOS except reading email and news so I don't understand why someone would scroll through thousands of cartoons instead of just typing :thumbs up: with their keyboard.

I think emoji are a result of software keyboards being too slow and crappy over physical ones. Typing on a keyboard is far more efficient and its why it took me so long to give up a Blackberry as my getting things done device. I loathe typing on iPhones and generally switch to my mac or call someone when a text conversation goes beyond 2-3 messages. So I guess emoji is for that? I still think it's something kids do kind of like voicemail is dead but for some reason audio messages via iMessage aren't?

Anyway, cool story and awesome resume item and while I understand they faced great challenges in this, I still think emoji things are effing stupid. What's so hard about just a smiley face?

: -)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Q-Dog, z970 and Feyl
MacRumors said:



Back in 2008, Angela Guzman was a graphic design student at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and an intern at Apple, where she joined the iPhone team and worked alongside another Apple designer, Raymond, to come up with the first 500 emoji characters that were available on the iPhone.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of her internship, Guzman has taken a look back at her time at Apple and her work on emoji in an interesting retrospective shared on Medium.

emoji2008-800x646.jpg

Image via Angela Guzman​
When Guzman was handed the emoji project at Apple, it came at a time when emoji were unfamiliar in the English speaking world. Guzman received a crash course in Apple design and then started designing emoji, which featured incredible detail even right from the start. Then Apple CEO Steve Jobs reviewed each batch of emoji before it was approved for launch.Some emoji, says Guzman, have interesting back stories. The happy poop swirl, for example, was reused as the top of the ice cream cone. Harder, more detailed emoji were left last, such as the now-iconic dancer with the red dress.

Guzman's emoji were first launched in Japan in November of 2008, and in the time since then, emoji have changed the way we communicate. Emoji have become an important part of the iOS and macOS ecosystem, and Apple has continued refining and improving its emoji offerings with each Unicode update.

As with the first Apple emoji designed by Guzman and her partner Raymond, emoji today feature incredible detail thanks to the talented artists at Apple who take the time to make sure each and every pixel is perfect.

iOS 11.1 was the last iOS update that introduced new emoji, bringing Unicode 10 characters like crazy face, pie, pretzel, t-rex, vampire, exploding head, face vomiting, shushing face, love you gesture, brain, scarf, zebra, giraffe, fortune cookie, pie, hedgehog, and more.

ios11emoji1-800x392.jpg

The next emoji update will come with the release of Unicode 11 in 2018, and emoji proposals for that update include smiling face with three hearts, blue face with icicles, smiling face with cape, mango, cupcake, kangaroo, llama, peacock, and red hair options for existing emoji.

Article Link: Former Apple Intern Looks Back at Designing First Apple Emoji in 2008
Click to expand...

Who'd have thought an intern would design what is now the very core of Apple's business :p
 
  • Like
Reactions: flowave, travisjaymoore, Oblivious.Robot and 11 others
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back