The Society of Convergence Knowledge TransactionsISSN:2287-8920(Print)융복합지식학회

With the increasing use of smartphones and SNS, emoticons as familiar expression symbols in non-face-to-face communication have been widely used as an auxiliary means of communication of various emotions. Through an empirical research on emoticon style design, we analyzed the importance of emoticon graphic elements and the preferences of emoticon style. Men consider more important of typographic elements, funny styles, and emoticons of star and broadcast style, women have a higher preference for animal graphic style emoticons, and simple graphics and cute styles are preferred at lower ages. On the contrary, the colored graphics are preferred as the age group gets higher, and the photo images are preferred in the teenagers and over 50s. Their 40s and over 50s showed high preferences in funny message, star, broadcast, cartoon, and webtoon styles. Graduate students and university graduates showed high preferences in colored graphics and typographical styles, and the message style was preferred relatively low for undergraduate students. In the star and broadcast styles, middle and high school students showed higher preference than other groups. Self-employed workers showed higher preference in colored graphics than other occupation groups, and housewives showed higher preference in photo images and typographies. We expect that the results presented through this empirical analysis will be used as basic data for emoticon design development and will help to vitalize the emoticon character market.