The Smiley Face

1963

Date: December 1963 · Place: Worcester, Massachusetts · Figures: Harvey Ball, freelance commercial artist · State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, client · Bernard and Murray Spain, button retailers · Franklin Loufrani, French registrant · Tags: Icon, Button, CorporateMorale 01. Forty-Five Dollars In December 1963 the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America hires Harvey Ball, a freelance commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts, to design a morale image for employees rattled by a corporate merger. Ball spends about ten minutes drawing a yellow circle, two oval eyes, and a curved mouth. State Mutual pays him forty-five dollars. The first hundred buttons are printed for an internal Friendship Campaign. Ball never registers the design. He earns nothing further from it for the rest of his life. 02. Fifty Million Buttons In 1970 Philadelphia novelty retailers Bernard and Murray Spain pair Ball's face with the phrase Have a Nice Day and sell it on buttons, mugs, and bumper stickers. By 1972 they have moved over fifty million units. In France in 1971 Franklin Loufrani registers the smiley commercially, founding what becomes The Smiley Company. Two parallel meme economies run for decades on an unregistered ten-minute drawing. "I made a smile. Just a yellow smile. Never thought it would go anywhere." — Harvey Ball, interview with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 1998 03. Ancestor of the Emoji On 19 September 1982 at Carnegie Mellon, Scott Fahlman proposes the colon-hyphen-parenthesis sequence as a joke marker on a bulletin board. Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 NTT DoCoMo emoji set includes a yellow circular smile directly descended from Ball's design. The yellow disc is one of the few twentieth-century icons that travels intact across paper, plastic, ASCII, Unicode, and PNG. Sources • Jimmy Stamp, 'Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?', Smithsonian Magazine, 13 March 2013 • Luke Stark and Kate Crawford, 'The Conservatism of Emoji', Social Media + Society, 2015 • Worcester Historical Museum, Harvey Ball Collection