Smiley
A smiley, also known as a smiley face, is a basic ideogram representing 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 representing eyes and a mouth. More elaborate designs emerged in the 1950s, featuring noses, eyebrows, and outlines. New York radio station WMCA used a yellow and black design for its "Good Guys!" campaign in the early 1960s. More yellow-and-black designs appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, including works by Harvey Ross Ball in 1963, and Franklin Loufrani in 1971. The Smiley Company, founded by Franklin Loufrani, claims to hold the rights to a version of the smiley face in over 100 countries. It has become one of the top 100 licensing companies globally.
There was a "smile face" fad in 1971 in the United States. The Associated Press ran a wirephoto showing Joy P. Young and Harvey Ball holding the design of the smiley and reported on September 11, 1971, that "two affiliated insurance companies" claimed credit for the symbol and Harvey Ball designed it; Bernard and Murray Spain claimed credit for introducing it to the market. This referred to the Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance Company of America and the Guarantee Mutual Assurance Company of America, whose 1963 "Smile Power" campaign first distributed smiley buttons to employees. In October 1971, Loufrani trademarked his design in France while working as a journalist for the French newspaper France-Soir.
Today, the smiley face has evolved from an ideogram into a template for communication and use in written language. The internet smiley originated with Scott Fahlman in the 1980s, when he first theorized that ASCII characters could be used to create faces and convey emotions in text. Since then, Fahlman's designs have become digital pictograms known as emoticons. They are loosely based on the ideograms designed in the 1960s and 1970s, continuing with the yellow and black design.
History of smiling faces
Early history
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, dating back to approximately 1700 BC, 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 with such a design to be found.Early to mid 20th century
The score of Erwin Schulhoff's "In Futurum" includes smiling and sad faces.In the 1930s, an eccentric Depression-era tramp was popularly dubbed "Santa Claus Smith". He identified himself as John S. Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe. He wandered across the United States, giving hand-scrawled checks for extravagant sums to people who showed him small kindnesses, such as meals, coffee, or lifts. His checks were written in indelible pencil on scraps of brown wrapping paper. They typically featured a crude smiling-face doodle—two dots for eyes, a dot for a nose, and a curved line for a mouth. His idiosyncratic handwriting often included the misspelling of "thousand" Contemporary documentation of his checks and the doodled smile can be found in bank correspondence reviewed for Joseph Mitchell’s 1940 profile. Later historical accounts have highlighted the episode as an early cultural appearance of a smile motif in the United States.
Ingmar Bergman's 1948 film Port of Call features a scene where the unhappy Berit draws a sad face – closely resembling the modern "frowny" face but with a dot for the nose – in lipstick on her mirror before being interrupted. In September 1963, there was the premiere of The Funny Company, an American children's TV program, which had a noseless Smiling face used as a kids' club logo; the closing credits ended with the message, "Keep Smiling!"
In the latter half of the 20th century, the face now known as a smiley evolved into a well-known symbol recognizable for its yellow and black features. The first known combination of yellow and black was used for a smiling face in late 1962, when New York City radio station WMCA released a yellow sweatshirt as part of a marketing campaign. By 1963, over 11,000 sweatshirts had been given away. They had featured in Billboard magazine, and numerous celebrities had also been pictured wearing them, including actress Patsy King and Mick Jagger. The radio station used the happy face as part of a competition for listeners. When the station called listeners, any listener who answered their phone with "WMCA Good Guys!" was rewarded with a "WMCA Good Guys!" sweatshirt that incorporated the yellow and black happy face into its design. The features of the WMCA smiley were a yellow face, with black dots as eyes, and a slightly crooked smile. The outline of the face was also not smooth, giving it a more hand-drawn look. Originally, the yellow and black sweatshirt, had WMCA Good Guys! written on the front with no smiley face.
Harvey Ball design
A number of United States–based designs of yellow and black happy faces emerged over the next decade. State Mutual Life Assurance Company in Worcester, Massachusetts wanted to raise the morale of its staff following a merger with another insurance company. Company Vice President John Adam, Jr., suggested a "friendship campaign". He assigned Joy Young, Assistant Director of Sales and Marketing, to lead the project. According to Worcester Historical Museum's documents, Young requested that freelance artist Harvey Ball design "a little smile to be used on buttons, desk cards and posters". Ball completed the happy face in ten minutes and was paid $45. His rendition, with a bright yellow background, dark oval eyes, a full smile, and creases at the sides of the mouth, became familiar worldwide as the most iconic version of the smiley. In response to queries why he had not trademarked the button design, Adam said: "We never intended to keep the smile to ourselves—we want everyone to smile and to keep smiling and to remind them that that is our first goal in serving our customers—keep 'em smiling!"In 1967, Seattle graphic artist George Tanagi drew his own version at the request of advertising agent David Stern. Tanagi's design was used in a Seattle-based University Federal Savings & Loan advertising campaign. Stern, who ran for mayor in Seattle in 1993, took credit for inventing the smiley face, saying he was inspired by the song "Put on a Happy Face" in Bye Bye Birdie.
The Philadelphia-based brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, after coming across the design in a button shop, appropriated it for novelty items for their business, Traffic Stoppers. They added the slogan "Have a happy day" and copyrighted this version. Though they believed that they could have gone to court to prevent other businesses from copying the smile alone, they said they would only do so if these businesses were "degrading the smile". They sold other manufacturers’ smile products alongside their own, reasoning that these "just enhance our own products". The Spain brothers expanded their business rapidly, producing over 50 million buttons with New York button manufacturer NG Slater.
The Smiley Company
In 1972, Frenchman Franklin Loufrani trademarked a version of a smiley face similar to Ball's design. 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, Nicolas Loufrani, the son of Franklin Loufrani, took over the family business and built it into a multinational corporation. Nicolas Loufrani was outwardly skeptical of Ball's claim to have created the first smiley face, arguing that the design is so simple that no one person can claim to have created it. As evidence for this, The Smiley Company's website cited what they called "the first human representation of the Smiley logo", a Neolithic stone shaped like a button found in a cave in Nimes. They also pointed to the use of a smiley face in the 1960 WMCA ad campaign, and mentioned the "smiley badge" of the State Mutual Life Insurance Company, without naming its designer.This "History" section of the website has since been removed. The about page, under the heading "Where It All Began", now reads:
"Paris, France - A young journalist named Franklin Loufrani had a stroke of invention... decided to design a campaign that would highlight positive stories to readers. His idea? A smiling yellow face next to all positive news and on fun products to spread the campaign in every home and public space."
The Smiley Company claims to own trademark rights to some version of the smiley face in about one hundred countries. Its subsidiary, SmileyWorld Ltd, in London, headed by Nicolas Loufrani, creates or approves all of the licensed Smiley products sold in countries where it holds the trademark. The Smiley brand and logo have significant exposure through licensees in various sectors, including clothing, home decoration, perfumery, plush, stationery, and publishing, as well as through promotional campaigns. The Smiley Company is one of the 100 top licensing companies in the world, with a 2012 turnover of US$167 million. The first Smiley shop opened in London in the Boxpark shopping center in December 2011. In 2022, there were many birthday celebrations for the smiley. Many of these came in the form of collaborations between The Smiley Company and large retailers, such as Nordstrom.
Nomenclature
''Smiley'' as an adjective
The word smiley can be traced back to Lanarkshire, Scotland, as a surname, and is home to other variations such as Smylie, Smyly, or Smaillie. During this period in history, surnames emerged from medieval nicknames. In this scenario, it would describe a person with a cheerful nature. The first recorded person is believed to be Thomas Smiley, who was recorded in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1660 as a major military figure. As a Williamite and following the migration of Scots to Ireland in the Plantation of Ulster, Thomas Smiley would likely have been a descendant of migrants from Lanarkshire in the previous century.As an adjective, the word "smiley" was used in literature occasionally, but it came after the word was used as a surname. As with the surname, smiley came about from the creative or colloquial shortening of smiling to mimic spoken dialect. James Russell Lowell used the word "smily" to replace “smiling” in his mid-19th-century poem, The Courtin’. Over a century later, in 1957, author Jane McHenry in Family Weekly magazine wrote, "Draw a big smiley face on the plate!" A year later, there was an illustration of a noseless smiling face containing two dots, eyebrows, and a single curved line for a mouth in a write-up in Family Weekly, Galloping Ghosts! by Bill Ross, with the text:
Collect six empty pop bottles and six cone-shaped paper cups. With crayons draw smiley faces on three of the cups and scary ones on the others. Put a cup on top of each bottle and line them up as 'ghosts.'..Keep score by counting five points for each scary-faced ghost knocked over and, since it is a night for spooks, only one point for each smiley!