A survey of 5,000 emoji users in the US finds 91% think emoji makes communication easier, 68% like emoji at work, 😂 is the most popular, and more
With Unicode's upcoming 15. release and a slew of new emoji on the way, we think it's the perfect time to share the results of Adobe's Future …
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe's Future of Creativity survey arrives just ahead of Unicode's 15.0 release, and it reads as a snapshot of how far emoji have traveled since SwiftKey mapped their popularity by region back in 2015. The throughline in the coverage is steady normalization: Instagram charted rising emoji usage on its service, Apple confirmed 😂 as the top US emoji among English speakers in 2017, and Unicode 14.0 added 112 new emoji last year, keeping the vocabulary expanding annually.
For Adobe, a company whose business rests on creative expression tools, publishing a 5,000-person survey is also a brand move — staking a claim as the authority on digital expression just as the next batch of emoji goes final. The headline numbers (91% say emoji makes communication easier, 68% like it at work) give corporate America fresh permission to formalize what the Wall Street Journal flagged in 2019: emoji as a tool for clarity and shared culture, not frivolity.
First-order effects
- Workplace communicators and HR teams get survey-backed cover to treat emoji as legitimate professional register rather than informal risk, with 68% of US users already liking emoji at work.
- Adobe positions itself as the reference source on emoji sentiment, a soft-power role previously held by keyboard makers like SwiftKey and platforms like Apple that published their own usage data.
Second-order effects
- Platform vendors whose typefaces determine how each emoji actually renders — Apple and Google, who previewed around 60 new designs for World Emoji Day in 2019 — gain more design influence as adoption deepens, since the same codepoint can read very differently across ecosystems.
- Unicode Consortium's annual release cadence becomes a de facto product calendar that messaging platforms, keyboard apps, and now brand researchers all plan around, amplifying each version drop.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, emoji consolidate into standard infrastructure of digital language — governed by one consortium's yearly vocabulary updates and interpreted by a handful of platform designers — with workplace norms codifying around them much as they did around email etiquette.
- Survey-driven legitimacy from major software companies points toward emoji literacy becoming an expected professional skill, shifting the burden from 'is this appropriate?' to 'which one conveys the right tone?'
The trend: Emoji are completing their shift from novelty to default layer of both consumer and workplace communication, with Unicode's annual releases setting the shared vocabulary and platform vendors controlling its rendering.