It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy, to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a great deal for companies like these. In hindsight, I probably should have begun my email subject lines with the word “AI”. That might have caught someone’s attention.) Fortunately, I was able to work around their reticence, because many people outside those companies were willing to talk. Mark Davis at Unicode, for example, who steered the emoji ship for its first years in the spotlight. Jeremy Burge, who documented emoji’s rise. Keith Broni, who took over from Jeremy at Emojipedia.

Now, I’m happy to add to that list Ollie Wagner, one of Apple’s first emoji designers, who got in touch after reading Face with Tears of Joy. Ollie is an designer and engineer who, as an intern on Apple’s Human Interface team in 2008, was one of three designers of the original Apple emoji set alongside Angela Guzman and Raymond Sepulveda. I talked to Ollie over email to get his story.

Keith Houston

How did you get involved with Apple’s emoji project?

Ollie Wagner

I was an intern on the Human Interface team at Apple in the fall of 2008. The emoji project had been started earlier that year by another intern, Angela Guzman, and I continued it.

KH

What did you have to work with in terms of art direction? Were you following any previous examples of emoji, emoticons or other symbols?

OW

We worked from a spreadsheet provided by SoftBank: each row a glyph, a column with their latest design, and some sparse comments. Because the emoji set ships as a font, we had to keep the characters internally consistent while still feeling like Apple. We were extending the visual language of the small set of “Smileys” that already shipped in iChat (the messaging app at the time — nobody called these things emoji yet) across hundreds of much more varied symbols.

KH

What was your design process?

OW

We had a lot of emoji to render, and quality of course couldn’t suffer, so I gave myself more time each day. I’d get to Apple’s studio earlier than anyone else and would stay there late — drawing these little emoji all day.

Zooming in to the process: my indie Mac software days had already drilled the Apple icon style into me, and I applied that sensibility to each one. I’d look up the object, get photo references from Google, and get to work in Photoshop. Each one was hand drawn with a combination of vectors, styles, and manual shading. From there, they would be submitted to SoftBank for initial review and then through to Steve Jobs for final approval.

KH

Were you given a fixed “menu” of symbols to design?

OW

Yes. The set was effectively standardized within each country where emoji had been launched, and carriers competed on whose designs looked best. We mapped almost 1:1 to SoftBank’s set, though Apple chose to omit a few of the more risqué ones.

KH

Did the Unicode Consortium’s work on emoji influence or affect your part in the project?

OW

No, their involvement didn’t come across my desk while designing them. I was just working against SoftBank’s spec at the time.

KH

Did you get a sense of how the iOS team, or the company as a whole, viewed emoji?

OW

Apple needed emoji on iPhone to compete in Japan. It was an essential feature and Apple didn’t have it. The HI [Human Interface] group took it seriously, but no one seemed to have the slightest sense of the cultural impact it would have.

KH

Have you had any involvement with emoji since your work on Apple’s first emoji set?

OW

My involvement with emoji ended with my internship and finishing the set. Future emoji were done by others on the team.

By the end of his internship, Ollie had designed more than 300 of Apple’s emoji, which were released a short time later. Ollie then joined Apple full time, where he worked on the original iPad. (He’s a named inventor on the iPad’s design patent, alongside Steve Jobs.) Today Ollie is a partner and founder at YAP Studios, a design and engineering studio, and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his family.

I was happy to get Ollie’s insights into emoji’s earliest days at Apple. It’s particularly interesting to see the company lavish so much care on a feature that was, arguably, little more than a box that had to be ticked for Apple to compete in the Japanese market – although of course, their thoroughness paid off, and Apple’s (and Ollie’s) emoji designs are perhaps the most recognisable in the world today.