In the beginning was the word, and the word was written down in black ink. Gutenberg saw that the black ink was good, and he separated the black ink from all the other colors. Gutenberg called the black ink a »font«, and all the other colors he called »illumination«. And some 560 years later, we still believe that a »font« consists of letters in one color, preferrably black. And we would still believe that, if it weren’t for the Japanese, who invented emoji.

It all started with the Internet, and with three simple characters: »:-)«. Those who typed the colon, the dash and the paranthesis, and then tilted their head, declared: »this looks like a smiling face!« And people saw that it was good, because they wanted to express emotions in simple text. So they created emoticons. They decided that 8-) was »cool« and that :P was »tongue out« and that :* was »kiss«. And they wanted more. Particularly in Japan, where the emoticons developed a culture of their own, and were called »emoji«. In 2007, the Unicode consortium decided to encode hundres of emoji into the international text interchange standard — Unicode. But plain black-and-white smiling faces were boring. People wanted color. So in 2010, Apple invented a way to put colorful emoji pictures into fonts. But that... that was only the beginning.