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Practical, playful, and sometimes bizarre, emojis have become an integral part of everyday communication. Emojis are ideograms—elements of a pictographic writing system the characters of which are stylized images. By introducing symbols into written language, they allow messages to be composed through a combination of letters and images, enabling a form of metalinguistic communication that previously did not exist in Western languages.
Emojis were invented by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese designer working for NTT DoCoMo in the mid-1990s. Kurita had a bold vision: bringing the web to mobile phones. At the time, mobile devices were bulky, operated through physical buttons, and limited to monochrome screens no larger than a postage stamp. To overcome these constraints, Kurita designed tiny 12×12-pixel symbols that could express emotions more accurately—and far more quickly—than text alone. Inspired by Japanese manga, these simple icons, ranging from cheerful to sad to grim, spread rapidly: first across Japan, then throughout Asia, and eventually around the globe.
After having developed web applications in the field of geoinformatics such as swisspeaX, Altiswiss, and Mont, and inspired by the OpenMoji project at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd in Germany—which offers a vast amount of high-quality, open-source emojis—the idea of creating an emoji world map seemed like a natural next step. Following the tradition of old maps with their topographical symbols, Emoji World shows earth in equirectangular projection using 20k emojis, complete with real-time day and night zones.
Prof. em. Thomas Weibel, Basel, Switzerland
(ȼ) 2025– twb, OpenMoji, CC BY-SA