You know the scenes in Friends when Ross starts talking about dinosaurs and he’s SUPER excited but everyone else is losing the will to live? This is basically that, only instead of dinosaurs, it’s emoji, and unlike Ross, I have never successfully befriended a monkey.

Last month, my coworker casually told me he still has a 2001 era DoCoMo phone, which is one of the first phones to have emoji (🤓🤓🤓: emoji first appeared in 1999, on DoCoMo phones, and DoCoMo phones alone). So I got ahold of this phone. Which charged, turned on and most importantly, TOTALLY had OG emoji:

I spent the whole day being unproductive and sending emoji messages to people:

SVGs

I then took a 10 hour flight to Europe and, for lack of better things to do while watching every movie that came out this year, I drew every one of those emoji as a sprite. 166 emoji in total, 12x12px each, in one of six colors. This was my first time doing pixels sprites, so I obviously fucked it up: I ended up with a bunch of random sprite sheets, each with a random number of sprites in it, which was a bit of a mess. Thankfully, Amanda Glosson, reigning queen of pixels, wrote me a script to transmogrify my mess into individual svgs. These individual SVGs, to be exact:

LOOK HOW PRETTY THEY ARE! 💓

A wild font appears

The reason why I made those SVGs was partly because Captain America: Civil War is unbearably boring, but partly because I wanted to make a font and use it everywhere like an emoji hipster.

So then I did. I used Fontastic to make the font – it’s black and white, because at the time of writing this, colour fonts weren’t supported on the web (tbh, even a year later, when colour fonts are supported, I still couldn’t tell you how to make on). I also mapped the original emoji glyph to one of the current existing emoji code points, based on this list, because let’s be honest, some of them were mysterious. Do you know what 💥 means? It’s 💥. And 💦 is 💦. 12 pixels ain’t a lot of pixels, friends.

Here the 166 emoji as they look today:

And here’s the same list, using the DoCoMo emoji font:

There’s some OG emoji that don’t even exist today!:

abcde

Boom! 💣

If you want to use it, you can download the font here, and use it as a font-face:

@font-face {
  font-family: og-emoji;
  src: url(/fonts/og-dcm-emoji.ttf);
}
.og {
  font-family: og-emoji, sans-serif;
}
<span class='og'>💥</span>

If you’re going to use it, maybe give me some credit, because I spent an unhealthy amount of time on it. Also, if you’re DoCoMo, please don’t sue me. Emojineering comes only from the ❤.

✌︎ ✨ 🐱 💋 🆗