Smiley

Example of a smiley face

A smiley, sometimes referred to as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram that represents a smiling face. Since the 1950s it has become part of popular culture worldwide, used either as a standalone ideogram, or as a form of communication, such as emoticons. The smiley began as two dots and a line to represent eyes and a mouth. More elaborate designs in the 1950s emerged, with noses, eyebrows, and outlines. A yellow and black design was used by the New York based radio station WMCA for its "Good Guys" campaign in the early 1960s. More yellow and black designs appeared in the 1960s and 70s including works by Franklin Loufrani and Harvey Ross Ball. Today, The Smiley Company holds many rights to the smiley ideogram and has become one of the biggest licensing companies globally.

In the 1970s Loufrani trademarked the name and his design in France while he was working as a journalist for France Soir. Competing terms were used such as smiling face and happy face before consensus was reached on the term smiley, less often spelled "smilie".^{[citation needed]}

Today, the smiley face has evolved from an ideogram into a template for communication and use in written language. This began with Scott Fahlman in the 1980s when he first theorized ascii characters could be used to create faces and demonstrate emotion in text. Since then, those Fahlman's designs have become digital pictograms, known as emoticons. They are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 70s, continuing with the yellow and black design.

Terminology[]

The online Merriam-Webster dictionary list 1848 as the earliest known use of "smiley" as an adjective for "having a smile" or "smiling."^[1] Early designs were often called "smiling face" or "happy face." This began in 1961 with WMCA's Good Guys, where they first incorporated a black smiley onto a yellow sweatshirt, and it was nicknamed the "happy face." The Spain brothers and Harvey Ross Ball both had designs in the 70s that concentrated more on slogans than the actual name of the smiley. When Ball's design was completed, it was not given an official name. It was however labeled as "The Smile Insurance Company" which appeared on the back of the badges he created. The label was due to the fact the badges were designed for commercial use for an insurance company. The Spain brothers used the slogan Have a nice day, which is now frequently known for the slogan rather than the naming of the smiley.

The word smiley was used by Franklin Loufrani in France, when he registered his smiley design for trademark while working as a journalist for France Soir in 1971. The smiley accompanied positive news in the newspaper and eventually became the foundation for the licensing operation, The Smiley Company. ^[2]

The name smiley became commonly used in the 70s and 80s as the yellow and black ideogram began to appear more in popular culture. The ideogram has since been used as a foundation to create emoticon emojis. These are digital interpretations of the smiley ideogram and have since become the most commonly used set of emojis since they adopted by Unicode in 2006 onwards. Smiley has since become a broader term that often includes both the ideogram design, but also emojis that use the same yellow and black design.

Ideogram history[]

Early history of smiling faces[]

For thousands of years, smiling faces have been used as ideograms and as pictograms. In recent times, the face now known as a smiley has evolved into a well-known image and brand, recognisable for its yellow and black features. It wasn't until the 1900s that the design evolved from a basic eye and mouth design, into a more recognisable design.

Signature of Bernard Hennet, Abbot of Žďár nad Sázavou Cistercian cloister, in 1741, with smiley-like drawing

The oldest known smiling face was found by a team of archaeologists led by Nicolò Marchetti of the University of Bologna. Marchetti and his team pieced together fragments of a Hittite pot from approximately 1700 BC that had been found in Karkamış, Turkey. Once the pot had been pieced together, the team noticed that the item had a large smiling face engraved on it, becoming the first item to with such a design to be found.^[3]

The Danish poet and author Johannes V. Jensen was amongst other things famous for experimenting with the form of his writing. In a letter sent to publisher Ernst Bojesen in December 1900, he includes both a happy face and a sad face.

A smiley face balloon from a Gregory FUNNY-B'LOONS ad page 20 of The Billboard March 18, 1922 page 20

One of the first commercial uses of a smiling face was in 1919, when the Buffalo Steam Roller Company in Buffalo, New York applied stickers on receipts with the word "thanks" and a smiling face above it. The face contained a lot of detail, having eyebrows, nose, teeth, chin and facial creases, reminiscent of "man-in-the-moon" style characteristics.

Another early commercial use of a smiling face was in 1922 when the Gregory Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio ran an ad for "smiley face" balloons in The Billboard This smiley face had hair, a nose, teeth, pie eyes, and triangles over the eyes.^[4]

Ingmar Bergman's 1948 film Port of Call includes a scene where the unhappy Berit draws a sad face – closely resembling the modern "frowny", but including a dot for the nose – in lipstick on her mirror, before being interrupted.^[5] In 1953 and 1958, similar happy faces were used in promotional campaigns for the films Lili (1953) and Gigi (1958).

The yellow and black happy face[]

In the United States, the first time a combination of yellow and black was used for a smiling face was in late 1962. During the 1960s and early 70s, a number of designers created smiling faces, which were categorized as "happy faces." The WMCA happy face became synonymous with 1960s culture in New York City. The New York-based radio station used the happy face as part of a competition for listeners. When the station called listeners, any listener who answered their phone "WMCA Good Guys!" was rewarded with a "WMCA good guys" sweatshirt that incorporated the yellow and black happy face into its design. Throughout the 1960s, thousands of these sweatshirts were given away.^[6][7][8] The features of the WMCA smiley was a yellow face, with black dots as eyes and had a slightly crooked smile. The outline of the face was also not smooth to give it more of a hand drawn look.^[8] Originally, the yellow and black sweatshirt (sometimes referred to as gold), had WMCA Good Guys written on the front with no smiley face.^[9]

According to the Smithsonian Institution, the smiley face as we know it today was created by Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist.^[10] In 1963, Ball was employed by State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) to create a happy face to raise the morale of the employees. Ball created the design in ten minutes and was paid $45 (equivalent to $380 in 2020). His rendition, with a bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, full smile, and creases at the sides of the mouth,^[8] was imprinted on more than fifty million buttons and became familiar around the world. The design is so simple that it is certain that similar versions were produced before 1963, including those cited above. However, Ball's rendition, as described here, has become the most iconic version.^[7][11] In 1967, Seattle graphic artist George Tenagi drew his own version at the request of advertising agent, David Stern. Tenagi's design was used in an advertising campaign for Seattle-based University Federal Savings & Loan. The ad campaign was inspired by Lee Adams's lyrics in "Put on a Happy Face" from the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Stern, the man behind this campaign, also later incorporated the Happy Face in his run for Seattle mayor in 1993.^[11]

The graphic was further popularized in the early 1970s by Philadelphia brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, who seized upon it in September 1970 in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day", which mutated into "Have a nice day". Working with New York button manufacturer NG Slater, some 50 million happy face badges were produced by 1972.^[12]

Evolution into the smiley[]

In 1972, Frenchman Franklin Loufrani legally trademark the use of a smiley face. He used it to highlight the good news parts of the newspaper France Soir. He simply called the design "Smiley" and launched The Smiley Company. In 1996 Loufrani's son Nicolas Loufrani took over the family business and built it into a multinational corporation. Nicolas Loufrani was outwardly skeptical of Harvey Ball's claim to creating the first smiley face. While noting that the design that his father came up with and Ball's design were nearly identical, Loufrani argued that the design is so simple that no one person can lay claim to having created it. As evidence for this, Loufrani's website points to early cave paintings found in France (dating from 2500 BC) that he claims are the first depictions of a smiley face. Loufrani also points to a 1960 radio ad campaign that reportedly made use of a similar design.^[13]

"Authentic Worcester-made smiley face", by Harvey Ball

The rights to the Smiley trademark in one hundred countries are owned by the Smiley Company.^[14] Its subsidiary SmileyWorld Ltd, in London, headed by Nicolas Loufrani, creates or approves all the Smiley products sold in countries where it holds the trademark.^[2] The Smiley brand and logo have significant exposure through licensees in sectors such as clothing, home decoration, perfumery, plush, stationery, publishing, and through promotional campaigns.^[15] The Smiley Company is one of the 100 biggest licensing companies in the world, with a turnover of US$167 million in 2012.^[16] The first Smiley shop opened in London in the Boxpark shopping centre in December 2011.^[17]

Language and communication[]

The earliest known smiley-like image in a written document was drawn by a Slovak notary to indicate his satisfaction with the state of his town's municipal financial records in 1635.^[18] The gold smiling face was drawn on the bottom of the legal document, appearing next to lawyer's Jan Ladislaides signature.^[19]

A disputed early use of the smiley in a printed text may have been in Robert Herrick's poem To Fortune (1648),^[20] which contains the line "Upon my ruins (smiling yet :)". Journalist Levi Stahl has suggested that this may have been an intentional "orthographic joke", while this occurrence is likely merely the colon placed inside parentheses rather than outside of them as is standard typographic practice today: "(smiling yet):". There are citations of similar punctuation in a non-humorous context, even within Herrick's own work.^[21] It is likely that the parenthesis was added later by modern editors.^[22]

On the Internet, the smiley has become a visual means of conveyance that uses images. The first known mention on the Internet was on 19 September 1982, when Scott Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University wrote:

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
 
 :-)
 
 Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
 things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

 :-(
^[23][24]

Yellow graphical smileys have been used for many different purposes, including use in early 1980s video games. Yahoo! Messenger (from 1998) used smiley symbols in the user list next to each user, and also as an icon for the application. In November 2001, and later, smiley emojis inside the actual chat text was adopted by several chat systems, including Yahoo Messenger.

The smiley is the printable version of characters 1 and 2 of (black-and-white versions of) codepage 437 (1981) of the first IBM PC and all subsequent PC compatible computers. For modern computers, all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 95^[25] can use the smiley as part of Windows Glyph List 4, although some computer fonts miss some characters.^[26]

The smiley face was included in Unicode's Miscellaneous Symbols from version 1.1 (1993).^[27]

Later additions to Unicode included a large number of variants expressing a range of human emotions, in particular with the addition of the "Emoticons" and "Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs blocks in Unicode versions 6.0 (2010) and 8.0 (2015), respectively. These were introduced for compatibility with the ad-hoc implementation of emoticons by Japanese telephone carriers in unused ranges of the Shift JIS standard. This resulted in a de facto standard in the range with lead bytes 0xF5 to 0xF9.^[28] KDDI has gone much further than this, and has introduced hundreds more in the space with lead bytes 0xF3 and 0xF4.^[29]

In popular culture[]

The smiley has now become synonymous with culture across the world. It is used for communication, imagery, branding and for topical purposes to display a range of emotions. Beginning in the 1960s, a yellow happy face was used by numerous brands in print to demonstrate happiness.

In print[]

Franklin Loufrani used the word smiley when he designed a smiling face for the newspaper he was working for at the time. The Loufrani design came in 1971, when Loufrani designed a smiley face for the newspaper, France-Soir. The newspaper used Loufrani's smiley to highlight stories that they defined as "feel-good news."^[2] This particular smiley went onto form The Smiley Company. Mad magazine notably used the smiley a year later in 1972 across their entire front page for the April edition of the magazine. This was one of the first instances that the smiling face had been adapted, with one of the twenty visible smileys pulling a face.^[30]

In the United States, there were many instances of smiling faces in the 1900s. However, the first industry to mass adopt the smiley was in comics and cartoons.

The logo for and cover of the omnibus edition of the Watchmen comic book series is a smiley badge, worn by the character the Comedian, with blood splattered on it from the murder which initiates the events of the story.

Music[]

As music genres began to create their own cultures from the 1970s onwards, many cultures began to incorporate a smiling face into their culture. In the late 1970s, the American band Dead Kennedys launched their first recording, "California über alles". The single cover was a collage aimed to look like that of a Nazi rally prior to World War II. The usual swastika banners used at rallies, was replaced on the single cover with three large smileys.^[31] In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, that emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. The association was cemented when the band Bomb the Bass used an extracted smiley from the comic book series Watchmen on the center of its "Beat Dis" hit single.

The Watchmen comic series logo

In the late-1980s, the smiley again became a prominent image within the music industry. It was adopted during the growth of acid house across Europe and the UK in the late 1980s. According to many, this began when DJ, Danny Rampling, used the smiley to celebrate Paul Oakenfold's birthday.^[32] This sparked a movement where the smiley moved into various dance genres, becoming a symbol of 1980s dance music.^[33]

Gaming[]

In 1980, Namco released the now famous Pac-man, a yellow faced cartoon character. In 2008, the video game Battlefield: Bad Company used the yellow smiley as part of its branding for the game. The smiley appeared throughout the game and also on the cover. The smiley normally appeared on the side of a grenade, which is something that became synonymous with the Battlefield series.^[34]

The 1987 Atari ST game MIDI Maze, released on other platforms as Faceball 2000, features round, yellow Smileys as enemies. When a player is eliminated, these enemies taunt the player with the phrase "Have a nice day."

Film[]

In addition to the movie adaption of the Watchmen, the film Suicide Squad has the character Deadshot staring into the window of a clothing store. Behind a line of mannequins is a yellow smiley face pin, which had been closely associated to another DC comic character, Comedian.^[35] The 2001 film Evolution has a three-eyed smiley for its logo. It was later carried onto the movie's spin-off cartoon, Alienators: Evolution Continues.

In the film Forrest Gump it is implied the titular character inspired the smiley face design after wiping his face on a T-shirt whilst running coast to coast.

Art[]

As part of his early works, graffiti artist Banksy frequently used the smiley in his art. The first of his major works that included a smiley was his Flying Copper portrait, which was completed in 2004. It was during a period when Banksy experimented with working on canvas and paper portraits. He also used the smiley in 2005 to replace the face of the grim reaper. The image became known as "grin reaper."^[36][37]

Other uses[]

During the London 2012 opening ceremony, early on in the show a number of giant yellow beach balls were released into the audience. Each had a large smiley face.^[38] Walmart uses a smiley face as its mascot.^{[citation needed]}

Ownership and trademarks[]

The Nirvana smiley

In 1997, Franklin Loufrani and Smiley World attempted to acquire trademark rights to the symbol (and even to the word "smiley" itself) in the United States. This brought Loufrani into conflict with Wal-Mart, which had begun prominently featuring a happy face in its "Rolling Back Prices" campaign over a year earlier. Wal-Mart responded first by trying to block Loufrani's application, then later by trying to register the smiley face itself; Loufrani, in turn, sued to stop Wal-Mart's application, and in 2002 after the issue went to court,^[39] where it would languish for seven years before a decision. Wal-Mart began phasing out the smiley face on its vests^[40] and its website^[41] in 2006. Despite that, Wal-Mart sued an online parodist for alleged "trademark infringement" after he used the symbol. The District Court found in favor of the parodist when in March 2008, the judge concluded that Wal-Mart's smiley face logo was not shown to be "inherently distinctive" and that it "has failed to establish that the smiley face has acquired secondary meaning or that it is otherwise a protectable trademark" under U.S. law.^[42] In June 2010, Wal-Mart and the Smiley Company founded by Loufrani settled their 10-year-old dispute in front of the Chicago federal court. The terms remain confidential.^[43] In 2016, Wal-Mart brought back the smiley face on its website, social media profiles, and in selected stores.^[44]

The band Nirvana created its own smiley design in 1991.^[45] It was claimed that Kurt Cobain was the designer of the Nirvana smiley, and following his death was one of the reasons why it became so iconic. As recently as 2020, media reports suggested a Los Angeles-based freelance designer was in fact behind the designs.^[45]

Fashion house Marc Jacobs designed a smiley in 2018, which had a yellow outline, with the letters M and J replacing the eyes. The mouth design was similar to the original Nirvana design. In January 2019, legal representatives of Nirvana announced they were suing Marc Jacobs for a breach of copyright.^[46] Following the announcement by a judge in Los Angeles that the suit could move forward,^[47] Marc Jacobs announced a countersuit against Nirvana.^[48]

See also[]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Smiley (category)

• Acid2
• Body language
• Emoji
• Emoticon
• Facial Action Coding System
• Galle (Martian crater)
• Kolobok
• Mr. Yuk
• Pac-Man (character)
• Pareidolia
• Red John
• Social intelligence

References[]