How Emoji Are Designed: From Sketch to Your Screen

The Art Nobody Thinks About

Every time you send a thumbs-up or a crying-laughing face, you are using a tiny piece of art that someone carefully designed. Not generated by an algorithm. Not pulled from a stock library. Designed by actual artists who agonized over curves, colors, shadows, and whether the teeth should show on the grinning face.

I have been obsessed with the design side of emoji for years. I have studied how different platforms approach the same Unicode code point and produce wildly different results. I have read every public talk and blog post from emoji designers at Apple, Google, and Samsung. And what I have found is a fascinating creative process that balances art, technology, cultural sensitivity, and corporate identity — all within a canvas smaller than your fingertip.

Let me take you through how an emoji goes from concept to the character on your screen.

Step 1: The Unicode Proposal

Before any designer picks up a stylus, an emoji must be approved by the Unicode Consortium. This is the gatekeeping stage, and it is more rigorous than most people realize.

Anyone can submit an emoji proposal to the Unicode Consortium. The proposal must include a description of the emoji, evidence of expected usage frequency, arguments for why existing emoji cannot represent the concept, and sample images showing possible designs.

The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee reviews proposals annually. They evaluate each submission based on factors like distinctiveness (is it visually distinguishable at small sizes?), completeness (does it fill a gap in the emoji set?), usage evidence (do people actually want this?), and broad applicability (is it useful across cultures, not just one region?).

If approved, the emoji receives a Unicode code point and a reference glyph — a simple black-and-white illustration that shows the intended concept. This reference glyph is deliberately minimal. It says "this is a flamingo" without dictating whether the flamingo should be pink, standing on one leg, or facing left or right.

And that is the starting point for design freedom.

Step 2: Platform Interpretation

Once an emoji has a Unicode code point and reference glyph, each platform vendor — Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, and others — designs their own version. There is no requirement to match the reference glyph exactly, only to represent the same concept recognizably.

This is why the same emoji can look dramatically different across platforms. The "pistol" emoji famously went from a realistic revolver to a water gun across all major platforms between 2016 and 2018. The "salad" emoji varies from a bowl of leafy greens to a full composed salad with eggs, tomatoes, and croutons depending on who designed it.

Each platform has its own design philosophy:

Apple

Apple's emoji design team, based in Cupertino, creates some of the most detailed and polished emoji in the industry. Apple emoji feature subtle gradients, realistic lighting, and a slightly three-dimensional style. The company's emoji have a signature warmth — soft shadows, rounded forms, and rich colors.

Apple's design process, based on what the company has shared publicly and what designers have described in interviews, starts with extensive reference research. For the food emoji, designers study actual food. For animal emoji, they examine anatomical references. The goal is recognizability at small sizes while maintaining a level of detail that rewards closer inspection.

Apple designers work primarily in vector tools, creating scalable artwork that renders crisply at any resolution from the tiny inline text size to the large presentation in the emoji keyboard. The final artwork is exported at multiple resolutions to support different device displays.

Google

Google's emoji design has evolved significantly over the years. The early Android emoji (the "blob" era) featured amorphous, blob-shaped characters with simple expressions. These were beloved by some users but criticized for being too abstract and inconsistent with other platforms.

In 2017, Google redesigned their entire emoji set with more traditional circular faces and detailed object emoji, aligning closer to Apple's style while maintaining Google's own identity. The current "Noto Emoji" design uses flat colors with subtle gradients, cleaner lines than Apple's, and a slightly more geometric aesthetic.

Google's emoji are part of the Noto font project, which aims to support every Unicode character in every language. This means Google's emoji team must consider internationalization from the start — designs need to be culturally neutral where possible and rendered consistently across Chrome, Android, Gmail, and other Google products.

Samsung

Samsung's emoji have had the most dramatic evolution of any major vendor. Early Samsung emoji were widely criticized for being inconsistent, oddly proportioned, and sometimes unrecognizable compared to the reference glyphs. The cookie emoji was a cracker. The dancing woman was a man in a suit. The pile of poo had eyes that stared into your soul.

Samsung has invested heavily in improving their emoji since 2017, and modern Samsung emoji are professional, polished, and much more consistent with the broader emoji ecosystem. They use a style that sits between Apple's detailed realism and Google's clean geometry — outlined forms with flat fills and moderate detail.

Microsoft

Microsoft's emoji underwent a major redesign in 2021, shifting from the flat, outlined "Segoe UI Emoji" style to a rich, 3D-rendered aesthetic for Windows 11. Microsoft even created animated versions using Fluent Design principles, featuring bouncy, playful motion. The 3D emoji were some of the most visually striking ever created, though Microsoft later reverted to a 2D flat style for better performance and consistency.

Step 3: The Design Grid

Emoji are tiny. On most devices, they render at sizes between 16x16 and 160x160 pixels. Designing artwork that reads clearly at 16 pixels is an entirely different discipline from designing artwork for a poster.

Every major platform uses a design grid — a canvas with guidelines that ensure consistency across the emoji set. Apple's emoji grid is based on a template that defines the maximum bounding area, optical alignment guides, and safe zones. Emoji should not extend to the very edges of the grid; there needs to be padding for inline text alignment.

The grid is not just about sizing. It defines visual weight. A small emoji like a bullet point or an arrow should have less visual mass than a face emoji, even if they occupy the same grid. Designers adjust stroke weight, fill area, and color intensity to manage perceived size.

For face emoji specifically, there are additional guides: consistent eye spacing, mouth positioning, and head size ensure that all face emoji feel like they belong to the same family. This is why emoji sets feel cohesive — even though each expression is unique, the underlying structure is consistent.

Step 4: Color and Shading

Color choice in emoji design is more complex than you would think. Designers must consider visibility against both light and dark backgrounds (critical in an era of dark mode), color-blind accessibility (roughly 8% of men have some form of color vision deficiency), cultural color associations (red means danger in some cultures but celebration in others), and consistency within the emoji set.

Apple uses a signature palette of saturated but slightly warm colors. Google tends toward slightly cooler tones. Samsung falls somewhere in between. These differences are subtle but contribute to each platform's distinct emoji "feel."

Shading is another critical consideration. Apple's emoji use realistic light-source shading, with consistent lighting from the upper left. This gives their emoji a three-dimensional appearance. Google uses flatter shading with minimal shadows. Samsung uses outlined forms with limited interior shading.

The shading approach affects how emoji render at small sizes. More shading means more detail, but detail can become noise at tiny sizes. There is a constant tension between visual richness at large sizes and clarity at small sizes.

Step 5: Animation and Dynamic Rendering

Modern emoji design increasingly includes animation. Apple's Memoji and Animoji brought animated emoji to the mainstream, but even standard emoji have animated variants on some platforms.

Telegram uses animated emoji that play short loops when sent in chats. Microsoft's Fluent Emoji included a full animated set. Samsung has explored animated emoji in their Galaxy devices.

Designing animated emoji introduces a new dimension of complexity. Each frame must maintain the emoji's recognizability. The animation must loop smoothly. File sizes must remain small for efficient transmission. And the animation must enhance, not distract from, the emoji's meaning.

In my experience, the best emoji animations are subtle — a slight bounce, a gentle rotation, a pulsing glow. The worst are distracting — rapid movement, excessive transformation, or animations that take too long to complete.

Step 6: Testing and Refinement

Before an emoji ships to billions of devices, it undergoes extensive testing. This includes rendering tests at all supported sizes to ensure legibility, cross-platform comparison to ensure the emoji conveys the same meaning as other platforms' versions, cultural review to catch unintended interpretations, accessibility review to ensure the emoji works with screen readers and voice descriptions, and A/B testing of design variations with internal teams and sometimes external focus groups.

Google has spoken publicly about their testing process, which includes printing emoji at various sizes and evaluating them at arm's length to simulate how users actually see them. Apple's testing is less publicly documented but reportedly includes extensive internal review cycles.

Samsung's testing improvements are visible in the quality jump of their recent emoji — the company clearly invested in systematic quality assurance after the criticism of their earlier designs.

The Creative Constraints That Make It Interesting

What fascinates me most about emoji design is how the constraints shape the creativity. Emoji designers work within extreme limitations: tiny canvas size, a need for instant recognizability, compatibility with text layout systems, cultural neutrality requirements, and consistency with hundreds of other emoji.

These constraints produce incredibly disciplined design work. Every pixel matters. Every color choice is deliberate. Every curve is optimized for clarity at minimal sizes.

This is not unlike icon design or pixel art — disciplines where the constraint of the medium forces clarity of thought. You cannot hide behind detail when your canvas is 20 pixels wide. The idea must be communicated instantly and unambiguously.

How Design Differences Cause Communication Issues

The fact that each platform designs emoji independently leads to real communication problems. The most famous example is the "grinning face with smiling eyes" emoji, which looks genuinely happy on Apple but appeared to grimace on Samsung for years. Users on different platforms were literally reading different emotions from the same message.

Less dramatic but more common: object emoji that look different enough to cause confusion. Is that emoji a cookie or a cracker? A pistol or a water gun? A knife or a dagger? When sender and receiver see different designs, the intended meaning can be lost.

This is why I always recommend — both for personal messages and brand communication — testing how your emoji look across platforms before committing to them. Tools like Emojipedia show every platform's rendering of each emoji, making cross-platform comparison easy.

The Future of Emoji Design

Several trends are shaping the future of emoji design: customization (Memoji, Bitmoji, and avatar systems that let users create personalized emoji), AI-assisted design (tools that generate emoji variations automatically, though human refinement remains essential), 3D and AR emoji (Apple's Memoji and Samsung's AR Emoji point toward more dimensional, spatial emoji), higher resolution displays (as screens get denser, emoji can carry more detail without sacrificing small-size legibility), and dynamic emoji that adapt to context (emoji that change appearance based on time of day, user preferences, or conversation context).

What This Means for Us as Users

Honestly? Most people will never think about any of this. They'll keep sending 😂 without wondering why Apple's version looks different from Google's, or why that specific shade of yellow exists.

And that's fine. That's actually the goal of good design — to be invisible.

But now you know. Next time someone argues about whether 🍑 looks more like a peach or a butt, you can tell them that designers at multiple trillion-dollar companies have had that exact debate in conference rooms. Someone made a deliberate choice about that peach's curvature. Somewhere, there's a designer who knows exactly why.

You're welcome for that mental image.