MoMA preserves 176 emoji built from twelve-by-twelve pixel grids
Shigetaka Kurita’s tiny mobile symbols offer a concrete lesson in what survives a very small display.
MoMA’s exhibition account describes a “12 × 12 pixel grid.” That gives each picture a strict space budget before any question of style.
A whole weather report, place or expression had to fit into a grid with 144 positions. Shigetaka Kurita’s emoji made that small square useful alongside mobile text.
MoMA’s exhibition account describes 176 designs released by NTT DOCOMO in 1999 for phones and pagers. The collection record dates the work to 1998–1999 and lists digital image files from a gift by NTT DOCOMO.
The museum describes the underlying format as a “twelve-by-twelve-pixel grid.” Multiplying those dimensions gives 144 positions per picture. Weather symbols and faces had to remain recognizable inside that space.
The name combines the Japanese words for picture and character. MoMA identifies sources of inspiration including manga, Zapf Dingbats and text emoticons. Those influences make the set a specific piece of interface history, with predecessors and references of its own.
The preserved pictures are worth inspecting at their intended small scale. Enlarging a grid can make its construction obvious while hiding the practical question of whether the symbol reads beside a short message.
A twelve-pixel grid makes every added mark a tradeoff. The useful experiment is to shrink a modern interface symbol that far and see what meaning survives.