By 
Laura Ustick found out that if you obsess over something long enough, you may just influence culture.
Ustick is the general manager of Super Dawg Drive-In, the Chicago hot dog business that has been in her family for three generations. So when, about a year ago, she noticed that a hot dog was missing from her emoji keyboard, it wasn't something she could overlook.
"I mention hot dogs in just about every conversation I have," says Ustick, 31. "The fact that they aren't in emoji is frustrating. It limits my ability to communicate on social media about my business and my passion for this American comfort food."
Ustick started tracking the way people across Twitter were talking about the lack of a hot dog emoji, and she found a tribe of like-minded supporters. One of them drew up a hot dog graphic to look like an emoji and sent it to her. That's when Ustick took her rant public.
She launched a Change.org petition asking Shigetaka Kurita and the president of the United States for a hot dog emoji, but neither could do a thing about her request. Kurita is the engineer who designed the first emoji images for cell phone use in Japanbut has no control over how emoji get made today, and the president has other things to do.
Ustick then reached out to titans of the hot dog community — Windmill Hot Dogs in New Jersey, Pink's Hot Dogs in Los Angeles, Hebrew National, Oscar Meyer, and Vienna Beef — and formed the Hot Dog Emoji Coalition on Facebook. Some are active members and commenters in the group; others support Ustick's efforts on social media and have joined the hashtag #hotdogemoji.
Then she went on an emoji hunger strike. "I decided to stop using any other emoji until we got the hot dog," Ustick says.
She didn't know if a hot dog emoji would ever happen. In fact, she wasn't even aware of how emoji get made until the Wall Street Journal wrote about her crusadein March.
"I thought all of it was a fun conversation, but I did not expect anything to happen," she says.
But earlier this month the Unicode Consortium – the agency that regulates communication across all software and decides which emoji get made – announced that hot dog made the cut in the latest list of 37 new emoji candidates, which should be available for use in 2015. The new emoji also include the cult favorites burrito, taco, and unicorn.
"I can't believe this is almost a reality," Ustick says. "It's amazing to know that people's voices actually do count. I'm going to use a hot dog emoji in every text and tweet from now on."
Ustick's obsession reflects more than mere food fandom. Emoji have completely transformed the way we communicate. Playing a part in advancing a language — yes, emoji is a language — is kind of a big deal.
The word "emoji" is translated from Japanese characters meaning, "picture letter."Japanese engineers (including Kurita) first introduced emoji in 1999 as a fun visual for Japanese cell phone users, but as they gained popularity, they started causing problems. There was no regulation in the coding and no uniform look to the emoji. For example different developers would create the same image of a cat face, but each used a different code. If one person sent a cat image using one code, but the recipient used a phone that supported a different set of code, the image wouldn't show up.
In 2007, the Unicode Consortium added emoji to its list of keyboard languages that it encodes and regulates. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, and Windows now follow Unicode's guidelines when developing programs and apps. This is why you can read emails from people in a different country or send emoji back and forth to friends, no matter what kind of phone each of you has.
The Unicode Consortium makes all the decisions on which emoji will be adopted. It has an Illuminati-like committee of top tech executives from companies such as Intel and Google that meets quarterly to review emoji proposals. It considers a variety of factors before any pitch is submitted for emoji consideration: how often the real thing is used in modern life, whether or not it can be communicated using existing emoji (for example, "crybaby" can be expressed with a baby emoji + a crying face emoji), how frequently it shows up in search engines (if someone were lobbying for a "bacon" emoji, Unicode would search the word bacon's search rankings), whether or not the object has multiple meanings (they consider it a good thing that "dog" can mean an actual canine, a close friend, or an untrustworthy lover), and whether or not it's distinct (it's not such a good thing that a "bowl of soup" could be construed as a pot, a pool, a mug, or anything else that looks round and shallow).
While Ustick didn't actually make a formal pitch for the hot dog emoji, her passionate campaigning did make a difference, says Mark Davis, president and co-founder of the Unicode Consortium, and chief internationalization architect at Google.
"We definitely looked at requests, including hers, when looking at the popularity of potential candidates," Davis said over email from his home in Zurich, Switzerland. In fact, Davis says all the new emoji listed under "Most Popularly Requested" were based on public feedback to Unicode and individual Unicode members, plus additional sources like petitions. "We're also looking at more ways of getting feedback for the future," he says.
This may make you hopeful that with the right amount of Internet buzz, you can successfully pitch, say, a Beyoncé emoji, but don't get too excited about the prospect.
"It is extremely unlikely that specific people or fictional characters would become emoji characters," Davis says.
[Sad face emoji.]
While you can submit your very own emoji proposal for whatever symbolic obsession you hold near and dear, so far most proposals have come from Unicode members or their partners in the tech community. And the process is painfully slow.
The smiling face with sunglasses was first proposed in 2007 and didn't come out until the Unicode 6.0 update in 2010. Each proposal must be accompanied with a thesis project's worth of research on the symbol — its meaning, its translation in different languages, its relevance, historical context, and any controversies it may pose. It then goes through several stages of review and analysis. The sponsor of every proposed emoji must defend it and engage in debates with the committee along the way. And then there's a final vote and approval by Unicode. Once an emoji is approved, it must be encoded and added to the next round of Unicode updates. The Unicode Technical Committee typically reviews only 50 to 60 proposals every year. Considering the limitless possibilities for emoji, that's a pretty small number.
Today, emoji are unavoidable. In digital communication, we use them as punctuation ("Can't sleep, roommate having loud sex [embarrassed emoji]") or even to replace complete sentences ("[women holding hands emoji] + [glass of wine emoji]?"). Emoji movie quizzes are in every corner of the Internet. Emoji "scholars" have used the cutesy pictures to translate Moby Dick and Beyoncé's "Drunk in Love." While it's unclear who exactly is dominating emoji usage, given the fact that Millennialsown more smartphonesthan any other group, it's safe to say you are a significant contributor to this global phenomenon.
Not so long ago, we used emoticons to add a little whimsy to an email or instant message. Emoticons used symbols to express facial emotion — smiley face :), sad face :(, winking face ;), winking-tongue face ;P — and were sideways. Emoji brings this type of communication right side up and in full color. This change in technology is as dramatic as the tornado that transported Dorothy from her black-and-white Kansas farm to Oz — a land full of Technicolor animals, red shoes, and oversize lollipops, all of which happen to be represented in modern-day emoji.
When Unicode releases new codes for emoji, it is up to the software companies – Apple, Microsoft, Windows, and every social media company that uses them – to design how they will look. They do this by creating a unique font that will read the letter-based emoji code that Unicode provides and translate it into pictures – similar to how you can change fonts in Microsoft Word. Even though emoji look slightly different on every platform, they are universally readable because of Unicode.
Apple and Android have designers in house creating fonts for their emoji. But when Twitter decided to update its emoji look, it hired design firm the Iconfactory. Iconfactory spent two and a half months hand-sketching the 870-plus emoji characters that Twitter would release to its users, but there was one that stumped them. They kept revising the eyes on what they knew would be one of the most important emoji in the set.
"I remember several separate meetings just about the poo emoji," says Gedeon Maheux, Iconfactory co-owner and principal designer. "We needed to get the expression just right and make sure it was fun and silly but not too gross."
A lot was riding on this project. Iconfactory would gain the caché of Twitter as a client, and the popular social network would have a proprietary set of emoji.
"Twitter wanted emoji that were more modern, lighter and innately more fun," Maheux says. "Getting the faces right across the board was the most challenging because you have to pinpoint the exact expression. I think the poo turned out pretty cute."
While all of the 1,000-plus Unicode emoji are available to every technology company, they're not required to use them all. For example, Apple changes its available emoji characters with each new iOS update, and Apple users only have access to the ones that show up on their devices. That's why an emoji you use often may seem to have suddenly disappeared when you update your system.
Emoji are so popular that there are also countless emoji-like images floating around the Internet that aren't actually emoji; they're stickers — graphics that anyone can create with images off the Internet, photos from your smartphone or a specific app that generates them for you. (This is how you would go about making that Beyoncé emoji.) You can embed a sticker in an email or on your blog, but Unicode doesn't support stickers, the only way to communicate with stickers via text or social media is by using an appthat was built for it.
In June, Unicode released version 7.0, which included more than 250 new emoji. Almost immediately it started fielding complaints that once again the human-like emoji were racially homogeneous. Five months later, Unicode announced that it would add a palette of six different skin tones that can be applied to 151 emoji characters. These changes will be available next year when Unicode 8.0 is released.
"The Unicode Consortium started looking at the diversity issue at around the start of 2014. By that time, it was too late to change Unicode 7.0," Davis said in an email. "The emoji characters for people and body parts are meant to be generic, yet following the precedents set by the original Japanese carrier images, they were often shown with a light skin tone instead of a more generic (nonhuman) appearance, such as a yellow/orange color or a silhouette."
Unicode's official recommendation has always been for designers to use non-human skin tones, such as Bart Simpson yellow or Shrek green, to show that emoji aren't actually supposed to represent people. Davis says emoji are meant to flavor our perception of people and language, not serve as a literal interpretation of them.
But the engineers behind Emojli have pushed the use of emoji further, launching their emoji-only messaging app earlier this year. It was supposed to be a joke, but in five months 46,000 users have signed up to have conversations strictly using pictures of fried eggs, bags of money, and phases of the moon.
"We have no idea if they understand each other," says co-founder Matt Gray. "Language evolves in unpredictable ways, and who knows? Maybe there'll be a petition to add emoji to a dictionary in a few years' time."
After all, emoji already has its own encyclopedia, and you can type in an emoji of pizza or a donut into Yelp or Bing and get resultsjust as you would by typing the words.
"They're brilliant, but they are also just dumb," says visual artist Liza Nelson, who photographs real people posed like emoji for her ongoing project "Emoji IRL.LOL."
"Emoji somehow says more than we often can with words. We think texting back and forth for hours with tiny pictures of poop and floppy disks and tongues is normal, like we've been doing this forever, when it's really quite innovative, shocking and bizarre," Nelson says. "Yet people just want to think for a second, laugh, share, and then move on because that's all our attention spans allow for — which I guess is exactly why emoji are ingenious."
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