What is the name of the artist who designed the first 176 emoji?

The artist who designed the first 176 emoji was Shigetaka Kurita. In the late 1990s, Kurita created a set of 176 pictograms for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile internet service in Japan.

The designs were extremely small: each was drawn on a 12-by-12-pixel grid. Kurita drew inspiration from Japanese manga symbols, weather icons, Chinese characters, and public signage, combining simple shapes with culturally recognizable visual ideas. The set included symbols for communication, transport, weather, numbers, and everyday activities.

Kurita is often called the inventor or father of emoji, but that shorthand can obscure the collaborative history of the technology. Japanese telecom companies had experimented with pictograms before his set, and other designers and engineers contributed to emoji’s development. Kurita’s 176-character collection is nevertheless widely recognized as the first major emoji set and a key foundation for modern emoji. In 2016, the original designs entered the Museum of Modern Art’s collection.