How a summer intern helped create Apple’s first emojis

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3 min readMay 20, 2024

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🌎 The Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit founded in 1991, is responsible for selecting the emoji on our phones. Anyone can submit a proposal for a new emoji right here. One of the requirements for inclusion? The emoji should have “notable metaphorical” or symbolic significance beyond its literal meaning. This fall, we’ll finally get a face with bags under its eyes (me), a leafless tree (death? burnout? climate change?), a harp (anything angelic), and a fingerprint (identity).
Issue #79: Moving in with your parents at 31 and Red Lobster’s missteps
By
Harris Sockel

Let’s rewind to the summer of 2008. Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” became the band’s #1 single. Mamma Mia! generated $132 million in theaters worldwide. The iPhone 3G was on sale starting at $290.63 if you adjust for inflation. And, in an office at 1 Infinite Loop, a graphic design intern named Angela Guzman was drawing tiny pictures that would change the world.

“My first emoji was the engagement ring, and I chose it because it had challenging textures like metal and a faceted gem, tricky to render for a beginner,” Guzman explains in her story, “The Making of Apple’s Emoji: How designing these tiny icons changed my life,” from the Medium archive. “The metal ring alone took me an entire day.”

Guzman and her mentor, full-time Apple designer Raymond Sepulveda, teamed up to create beloved icons like 😂, ❤️, 🎉, and 💩. The brief from Apple was to design “luscious illustrations” that would help the company enter the Japanese market. (Emoji were already very much a thing in Japan.)

In a single summer, they crafted the initial set of 500. A few details I love, from Guzman:

  • 👗 “The woman’s turquoise dress with the brown waist band… was inspired by the color palette and proportions of a dress that my sister had created in real life that same year.”
  • 🍦 “Raymond reused his happy poop swirl as the top of the ice cream cone. Now that you know, bet you’ll never forget.”

Guzman remembers this as a time in her life when she experienced the Japanese concept of ikigai, or “the place where one’s passion, mission, vocation, and profession intersect; what some would say the reason to get up in the morning — literally me in 2008.”

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Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on mentorship

“Don’t just find a mentor — allow yourself to be mentored,” writes Jimmy Soni in a list of life lessons from Claude Shannon (a mathematician who invented the foundations of modern computing). Doing so requires more humility than most of us think.

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

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