The original emoji were designed by Shigetaka Kurita for Japanese telecommunications company DoCoMo in 1999 to use on pages in Japan. Those small, pixelated 12-by-12 grid images only bear a passing resemblance to today’s far more detailed emoji, but there’s a clear line that can be drawn between Kurita’s early work and the thousands of emoji characters on our phones. Kurita has been involved in the project; Reed and Smyth flew out to Tokyo to interview him for additional context on the original designs, and he’ll also be contributing an introduction…