This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
Apple has chosen with the release of Lion to build in the very commonly used Emoji characters.
In order to access these characters from any text entry area simply press Command-Option-T on your keyboard (as shown below) and the characters window as shown at the beginning of this article will be displayed.
Make sure you are in the Emoji area and when you want to use one of the characters simply double click and the character will be automatically entered into the associated text area.