About This Project

🤔 The Origin Story

It started with a text message. A friend sent an emoji I had never seen before — the otter 🦦. I was fascinated. How had I missed this? This led me down a rabbit hole of emoji exploration, where I discovered that I had never used, or even noticed, approximately 80% of available emojis.

Think about it: there are thousands of emojis, each one designed by talented artists at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and other platforms. Each emoji represents hours of creative work — sketching, iterating, perfecting colors, ensuring cross-platform consistency.

🎨 A Tribute to Designers

Somewhere, a designer spent an entire afternoon perfecting the shading on the curling stone emoji 🥌. Another designer carefully crafted the intricate details of the amphora 🏺. These artists pour their creativity into work that, for many emojis, rarely sees the light of day in actual conversations.

This project is a tribute to them. Every day, we spotlight one underused emoji and remind the world that it exists, that someone created it with care, and that maybe — just maybe — it deserves a place in your next message.

📊 How We Define "Unused"

Our rarity scores are based on a combination of factors:

• Social media usage data
• Keyboard accessibility (how many taps to find it)
• Cultural specificity (some emojis are popular in specific regions)
• Age of the emoji (newer ones tend to be less known)
• General awareness surveys

✨ The Math of Afternoons

Each emoji is designed independently by each platform. When we say a designer spent 8 hours on an emoji across 6 platforms, that's potentially 48 hours of human creativity — or 12 afternoons of focused design work — just for that one small character on your keyboard.

Some emojis have been designed for even more platforms over the years as they get added to new systems. The total creative investment across all emojis is staggering.