An interview with Ollie Wagner, Apple emoji designer

It was impossible, I found, when writing Face with Tears of Joy, to get a response to questions or interview requests out of Google, Apple, Meta and the other big emoji vendors. (A lone author writing a book on a twenty-year-old technology probably doesn’t move the PR needle a great deal for companies like these. In hindsight, I probably should have begun my email subject lines with the word “AI”. That might have caught someone’s attention.) Fortunately, I was able to work around their reticence, because many people outside those companies were willing to talk. Mark Davis at Unicode, for example, who steered the emoji ship for its first years in the spotlight. Jeremy Burge, who documented emoji’s rise. Keith Broni, who took over from Jeremy at Emojipedia. Read more →