Style Blog: Emoji IRL: A Q&A with the designer who sees emoticons as works of art

Since Apple introduced the illustrated characters to its iPhone library in 2011, emoji have been a beloved piece of the American texting vernacular. But to 25-year-old Liza Nelson, the artist and graphic designer behind the wildly popular project "Emoji IRL. LOL," which imagines the icons as their real-life equivalents, emoji represent something bigger -- a universal language, a revolution in graphic art and a tidal shift in the way we communicate.