When words fail

When American graphic designer Harvey Ross Ball first designed the original ‘smiley’ to raise the morale of his fellow employees, he was paid a grand total of $45. Little did he know that 50 years later, designs inspired from the one he created in ten minutes would not only become indispensable to conversations around the world but would also clinch a place in the Oxford’s definitive English language dictionary as the ‘word’ of the year. But emojis are conquering in more ways than one. A recent example would be the move by RPG Group CEO, Harsh Goenka who has made an emoji the face of the brand to connect better with the next generation audience. The evolution of the smiley to emoticons and finally to ‘emojis’ is no less than a birth of a new language in itself. But as these round faces that define so well our everyday emotions get rooted and assimilated in everyday social communication, we look at how far they’ve come and how far they are yet to go. While some argue that they can only supplement the written word, there are others who feel it wouldn’t be a surprise if a few years down the line, we would be writing our stories and you would be reading them all in ‘emojis’.

While technological progress has created more room for experimentation with simple designs, the lexicon of this new mode of communication seems to be growing exponentially. And leading the race to create emojis not just for emotions but for moods, things, ideas and everything under the sun are the leading popular Instant Messaging platforms. While WhatsApp offers its clients an exhausting choice of emojis to choose from, other players such as Hike, Snapchat and more are experimenting with motion graphic such as Gifs and customisable emojis to allow more room for easy communication.

However, while emojis are more preferred than drab texts, they often miss out on clarity in the chase for visual appeal, feels professor, centre of linguistics, JNU, Ayesha Kidwai. She says, “An image is never as to-the-point as a word. For example, you can have different icons for happiness and sadness, but mostly you can’t point out what kind of happiness. Most of the emoticons mean more than one thing. Also, emoticons are an alternate mode between two computer terminals, where expressions are more standardised. So you can’t really write anything definitive. For example, in case you want to say ‘I went to the market’, you will have to type ‘I’, ‘went’ and perhaps use an image to denote ‘market’,” she adds.

Attesting this point is 24-year-old avid emoji user Tanya Sharma, who says that emojis have landed her in trouble more than once. She says, “A simple case in point is a popular whatsapp emoji which is in the form of a swirled lump of brown paste. Now while I understand it as animal faeces, one of my friends mistook it for chocolate ice cream. So as one can imagine, they are prone to misinterpretation and can lead to consequences that can be comical or sometimes even disastrous.”

But the problem of misinterpretation is not something that is unique to emojis, argues Subhash Tendle, who teaches creative communications at MICA. Subhash says, “Misinterpretation happens even through words. A single spoken sentence can evoke myriad interpretations merely through where the stress is placed. But in any case since most communication through emojis is contextual, this problem is something that we have to live with.”

While emojis are a fairly new addition to the conventions of social communication, it is only the next step in a natural progression feels Subhash Tendle who argues, “While we pick up textual communication as and when we grow, we are cognitively trained to comprehend visual ideas.”

Explaining the evolution of emojis from a historical perspective, Professor Suresh Emmanuel of the National Institute of Design says, “Historically, there are two ways in which communication evolves — one is the structure, which is how new dialects and variations are formed and the other is the script, which changes very slowly. In retrospect, the alphabets themselves are simple forms of designs, which are derived from pictorial designs. They were the first recording tool of communication. So, the rise of emojis is similar to the form coming a full circle from where it started, such as the hieroglyphs. The form of the alphabet has often been subject to the medium it is used on. For example, the south Indian languages used a palm leaf as the medium and hence they took a curved form because curves are easier to write on palm leaves. For writing in stones, straight line-based scripts are preferred. Similarly the medium for the emojis is the new digital, electronic screens. Since they provide more room for visual experimentation, simple images are preferred while communicating through them.”

While the exhaustive range of emojis may already be enough to create and convey simple sentences and ideas, the journey of this new form is only just beginning, feels graphic designer Sitanshu Datta, the founder of city-based design firm Paper design. “These are definitely exciting times for design. But the core idea or the reason behind why emojis are getting popular is the thirst for shorter, simpler and more succinct modes of communicating with each other. While as of now these emojis are only complementing textual language, there is really no telling how far they can go.”

Inputs from Somudra Banerjee