Have you ever wondered who comes up with the kinds of emojis used in online messaging?

Well, emojis are a form of pictogram that have been around since the days of Yahoo! and MSN Messenger. The Unicode Consortium is an independent web standardisation group that approves and releases them.

Earlier this year, the release of Unicode 8.0 brought with it a more racially diverse range of emoji faces (just tap and hold on the face to get the full set of skin tones).

Next year, 38 new emojis will be added including, bizarrely, plenty of foodstuffs: bacon, potatoes, carrots, cucumbers and the croissant. More importantly, we will be getting the fist bump, selfie, “call me” hand and the high five.

unicode.org/L2/L2015/15054r4-emoji-tranche5.pdf