Shigetaka Kurita's 176 pictograms for NTT Docomo's i-mode phone service popularize emoji, which join the Unicode standard in 2010 and become a global visual language.
Contested history
Consensus: Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 set for NTT Docomo was the most influential early emoji set, though not the earliest.
Kurita's set was the first emoji ever madeDebunked
SoftBank's J-Phone released a phone with a set of emoji in 1997, two years before Docomo's i-mode set.
Kurita's set popularized emoji and shaped the Unicode setEstablished
Docomo's i-mode set spread widely in Japan and MoMA acquired it in 2016 as the original emoji design.