Did You Know a Latina Designed Your Favorite Emojis?

We use them for everything. They help us in awkward situations and save us a lot of time in conversations. Undoubtedly, emojis have changed how we communicate forever. But did you know that the idea came from a Latina designer?

Her name is Angela Guzman. She is a Colombian immigrant who revolutionized digital design after interning at Apple.

Raised in Miami, Guzman turned her immigrant experience into a solution for everyone

Upon arriving in the United States, Angela Guzman struggled with learning English. She resorted to using images in elementary school to communicate.

This passion for design led her to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Angela Guzman came to Apple, and everything changed

While studying for a Master of Fine Arts, Apple offered Guzman an internship to join the iPhone design team. It was 2008, and together with Raymond Sepúlveda, Guzmán was responsible for designing hundreds of emojis that today are still part of our daily language.

“I was still trying to make sense of the assignment I’d just received when someone asked if I knew what an emoji was,” she wrote in a Medium post about her creation. “And well, I didn’t, and at the time, neither did the majority of the English-speaking world. I answered ‘no.’… Moments later, I learned what this Japanese word meant and that I was to draw hundreds of them.”

The first emoji Guzman designed? The engagement ring

“The metal ring alone took me an entire day,” she wrote. “Pretty soon, however, I could do two a day, then three, and so forth. Regardless of how fast I could crank one out, I constantly checked the details: the direction of the woodgrain, how freckles appeared on apples and eggplants, how leaf veins ran on a hibiscus, how leather was stitched on a football, the details were never-ending.”

Guzman created the first batch of nearly 500 emojis. After graduating, she returned to Apple to work full-time for five years. She was involved in the initial projects for apps like FaceTime and iMessage.

How a Latina literally changed the world

Although emojis (from the Japanese “image+character”) have existed since the late 1980s, they are a global language. The first emojis were created by Japanese portable electronic device companies. Over time, they became very popular. In 2010, Unicode began to codify them and make them standard. Five years later, Oxford Dictionaries named the emoji ???? the word of the year.

But to go from a smiley face or a heart that we loved so much on MSN Messenger to a whole dictionary was the work and genius of a Latina.

Cool, right?