How a summer intern helped create Apple’s first emojis
🌎 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.”
What else we’re reading
- Red Lobster closed 50 locations last week and is filing for bankruptcy. Its parent company, seafood producer Thai Union, cut costs so deeply that servers were forced to cover 10 tables instead of 3, which understandably made everyone upset (among lots of other cost-cutting measures). If you’re feeling nostalgic, here’s essayist Adeline Dimond on what made Red Lobster special in its heyday: reliable kindness.
- In “I’m a 31-year-old Screenwriter Who Had To Move Back in With His Parents. And That’s Okay,” David Mandell learns to distinguish between basing his identity on status (a glamorous life as a Hollywood screenwriter with a chic minimalist apartment) vs. basing it on something more real, like his actual lived experience, warts and all.
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
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
