June 16, 2026
Tiny icons, giant feelings
An interview with an Apple emoji designer
Apple’s first emoji artist spills secrets as fans praise, nitpick, and demand a walnut
TLDR: Former Apple intern Ollie Wagner says he helped create more than 300 of Apple’s first emoji in 2008, with the tiny drawings eventually getting top-level approval from Steve Jobs. Commenters loved the origin story but quickly spiraled into jokes, nostalgia, and one unforgettable complaint: why do we have all this and still no walnut emoji?
The big reveal here isn’t just that one Apple intern, Ollie Wagner, helped hand-draw more than 300 of the original Apple emoji back in 2008 — it’s that the comments instantly turned into a mini culture war over what emoji matter, what they look like, and why some people are still weirdly emotional about them. Wagner says the tiny icons were built because Apple needed them to compete in Japan, with designs reviewed all the way up to Steve Jobs. Translation: those little smiley faces were treated like serious business before most people even called them emoji.
And the community? Equal parts fascinated, nostalgic, and gloriously petty. One reader dropped an Emojipedia link like a public service announcement for the truly obsessed. Another got hit with an unexpectedly specific complaint: why does the site feel like “typed text on paper”? But the loudest, funniest hot take came from the commenter raging against emoji priorities: “There is still no walnut emoji. Blonde-haired, black-skinned pregnant man? Yes. Walnut? No.” That one has everything — representation discourse, grocery-store chaos, and peak internet energy.
There was also pure nostalgia from longtime users who remembered hacking their phones by adding the Japanese keyboard just to unlock emoji in the US. So yes, this is a sweet behind-the-scenes Apple story — but in the comments, it became a dramatic referendum on design, missing food icons, and the eternal truth that someone, somewhere, is furious their favorite object isn’t an emoji yet.
Key Points
- •The article features an interview with Ollie Wagner, a 2008 Apple Human Interface intern who helped design Apple’s original emoji set.
- •Wagner says Apple’s early emoji work was based on a SoftBank spreadsheet of glyphs and designs, with Apple adapting the visuals to match its own style.
- •He describes a manual design process in Photoshop using vectors, styles, shading, and photo references, with review by SoftBank and final approval by Steve Jobs.
- •According to Wagner, Apple followed SoftBank’s emoji set closely but omitted some more risqué symbols.
- •Wagner says emoji were added to the iPhone primarily because Apple needed the feature to compete in Japan, and he designed more than 300 emoji before his internship ended.