Nicolas Loufrani is the son of Franklin Loufrani, founder and president of the Smiley Company, who created the iconic Smiley logo as part of a feel-good news campaign for the France Soir newspaper. The campaign was launched by the French publication during the 1970s with the mission of countering a slew of negative headlines pertaining to social and political unrest, with the Smiley logo quickly gaining traction as a symbol of positivity and hope.
Emojis may be frequently credited to Shigetaka Kurita, but in reality their roots predate Kurita’s work in 1999, with the Smiley Company having significantly shaped the emoji landscape. Nicolas Loufrani – CEO of the Smiley Company – isn’t considered the emoji creator, but in a 2017 interview with Vice he said that emojis had undoubtedly been inspired by Smileys.
As detailed on the Smiley Company website, Nicolas Loufrani agrees that Shigetaka Kurita’s emojis are incredibly beautiful and deserve their presence at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Rendered within the constraints of a 12×12 pixel grid, Kurita’s emojis were a smart solution to the limitations of mobile technology prevailing at the time, focusing primarily on activities. Kurita’s emojis were not initially designed to be sorted by category; however, they do fall loosely into eight categories, namely symbols, sports, places, weather, objects, travel and zodiac, with just a handful of human emotions.
While Kurita’s emojis placed little emphasis on human expressions, the Smiley Company’s icons were primarily designed to capture a vast array of human emotions and activities from the outset, capitalising on the full potential of nascent 3D graphics and digital colour displays. This broader emotional range and categorisation created the foundations for the emojis of today, with these colourful icons influencing not just the design but also the concept of digital communication itself. Comparing the emojis launched on Apple smartphones in 2008 with Kurita’s emojis and Nicolas Loufrani’s Smileys from 1997, it is clear that modern emojis look closer to the latter.
According to the Smiley Company website, Nicolas Loufrani’s early work influenced several other tech companies in addition to Apple. When Apple collaborated with Softbank to launch its first set of emojis in Japan in 2008, the 471 icons included bore the influence of the expressive depth and broad categorisation established by Nicolas Loufrani more than a decade before. Apple’s first set of emojis captured 77 emotions in total, with expressions portrayed by round, yellow icons, including some in cat or monkey form, featuring no black outline and a white light and orangey shadow effect. These were close to Nicolas Loufrani’s original 1997 style, albeit with slightly different traits inspired by Japanese animé and manga culture – notably an open mouth and a line of white teeth, with the addition of eyebrows in some instances.
As Nicolas Loufrani points out, the narrative that solely credits Shigetaka Kurita for emojis overlooks the rich tapestry of their evolution. The Smiley Company’s journey in pioneering the landscape of emojis started in 1996, with the licensing of a Smiley pictogram to Alcatel for the first apparition of such a logo on a cell phone screen. By the following year, Nicolas Loufrani had embarked on creating a more nuanced form of digital expression, developing a series of logograms conveying a broad spectrum of emotions and popular activities. By 1999, Nicolas Loufrani had created some 256 icons in total, which were classified in 11 separate categories: moods, animals, celebrations, fun, flags, countries, occupations, sports, moods, planets and the zodiac. These images were more than mere pixel symbols, culminating in a comprehensive, easily identifiable colourful and detailed logographic system to enrich communication and make it more human and engaging.
