Designing the smiley face
Posted December 14th, 2009.
I was interested today to read about Harvey Ball, the graphic artist credited with designing the smiley face logo in 1963. No disrespect to Harvey but I couldn’t help think that some 5 year old girl a millennium ago was more likely to have created the first smiley.
Credit to Harvey though, he put his name to it first.
Taken from Wikipedia, “the use of the smiley face was part of the company’s friendship campaign whereby State Mutual handed out 100 smiley pins to employees. The aim was to get employees to smile while using the phone and doing other tasks.
The buttons were highly popular, with orders in lots of 10,000. More than 50 million Smiley Face buttons were sold by 1971, and the smiley has been described as an international icon.”
The punchline to the article was that although the buttons the logo was designed for had sold more than 50 million units in the following 8 years, Harvey never trademarked his logo and so received only the initial $45 dollars ( about $300 by today’s standards ) for the design.
Doh!
Wouldn’t you just be kicking yourself?
It is funny to think of someone “inventing” the smiley logo, like you said, surely it’s been around forever.