Ever wanted to create your own emoji? Now’s your chance

feature you ever so searched for a specific emoji spell texting — i that shows exactly how you’re intuitive feeling, or can land the perfect punchline — only to discover that emoji doesn’t exist?

Now’s your chance to fix that.

The Unicode Consortium is accepting suggestions for new emojis from the public until July to expand its library of 4,000 digital icons that brighten up everyday texts and emails. Unicode, a non-profit corporation based in California, standardizes how letters, special characters and emojis are encoded across operating systems.

Graphic designer Jennifer Daniel, who chairs the emoji subcommittee at Unicode, says proposed emojis are researched, reviewed, designed and modified in a much more meticulous process than one might think.

“We're always looking at frequency of use … is it visually distinctive? … can it be used beyond literally representing itself?” she said.

“We want to make sure that it's not just going to collect cobwebs and clutter your phone.”

The emojis pitched now won’t hit phones until early 2028, but anything added to the Unicode library stays there forever. And while there are thousands, Daniel says only five emojis make up 25 per cent of all use.

Those are:

Emojis as we know them emerged in Japan in the mid-to-late 1990s, said Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia.org, an online emoji encyclopedia and design archive.

“The word emoji is a Japanese word. It's actually kind of a combination of words, which means a picture character. So e – picture, moji – character,” he said.

Digital devices did have symbols and emoji-like characters dating back to the ‘80s. But in 1999, the Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo commissioned designer Shigetaka Kurita to produce a set of icons for their new mobile internet service — and the modern emoji was born.

Broni says these emojis were incredibly popular in Japan throughout the 2000s, but they weren’t always consistent across devices — an emoji on your phone might be a completely different object on someone else's.

Western tech companies, developing smart phones and eyeing the Japanese market, proposed that Unicode include emojis in their encoding standard, with the first batch incorporated in 2010.

Even with all that work to make emojis consistent, people bring their own meanings and interpretations to emojis. Daniel points to the melting face emoji as one with as many uses as a “Swiss army knife.”

“It's smiling, it's happy, but clearly something's going on — like happy but sad,” she said. 

It can be read as someone overheating on a hot summer’s day, or perhaps, expressing regret.

Since emojis are small, they are often misread on a visual level, too, Broni adds. For instance, people used to use crying laughing for just crying, because they saw the large tears but not the smile.

He also pointed to the cucumber emoji, which appears as a full cucumber on some devices, but is being cut into slices on other platforms. 

“That can be quite traumatic for people if they're looking to expand beyond the classic eggplant emoji, when they're trying to send something a little risqué,” he said.

“Someone is seeing something that is phallic on their device, but on the other device, it's been chopped to pieces.”

At the University of Toronto Mississauga, Jordana Garbati teaches a course on emojis, where students put together designs and detailed proposals for their own emojis.

"Last year, a student proposed a samosa. This year, students proposed different clothing related to specific cultures," said Garbati, an associate professor at the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.

Student Sharleen Bains used AI and editing tools to create a Messy Hair emoji, inspired by her own waves, to capture “the feelings of stress and chaos that people may experience on more overwhelming days.” Her classmate, Justin Abraham, designed an emoji of a steelpan — a musical instrument originating in Trinidad and Tobago — because he wanted to advocate for "greater Caribbean representation in digital communication."

The course also challenges students to explore their own emoji use, as well as how they’re used across different cultures and disciplines like political science, medicine, or the arts.

Garbati says some people do use emojis as decoration, but they’re also used “to alter tone, to emphasize, to add humour” to what is otherwise “plain black-and-white text.”

“People are using them to try to mimic some of the reactions and emotions that might be visible in face-to-face communication, but are not so clear in digital communication,” she said.

Daniel agrees, pointing out that emojis allow us to say “I’m joking” or “I’m annoyed” without writing whole explanatory paragraphs.

“They don't replace words. They really give our words their intention back,” she said. €œJust like when we're talking, you know, we don't just say words, we express them.”

That expression can often lead to a lot of creativity, she says.

“I have a friend who, when she's having a nervous breakdown, she sends me a cartwheel emoji and a black hole. So it looks like they're cartwheeling into a black hole,” she explained.

“It is our now secret little language of what we text each other when we need the other person to pick up the phone. And I love that. I love seeing how people are using emoji to say new inventive things.”

Audio produced by Kate Swoger.

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