The million-dollar smile
they copyrighted the smiley face in conjunction with the phrase “Have a Happy Day”.
The popularity of the products surprised everyone. The smiley quickly infected American culture. It became a symbol of consumer America – stamped on everything from cheap plastic trinkets to upmarket goods sold in swish department stores. Murray and Bernard became celebrities known as the “Smile Brothers”. Murray attributes the smiley’s success to the national mood. Many Americans felt jaded as a result of economic uncertainty and the Vietnam War. People wanted to brighten their spirits – and it helped to wear a badge emblazoned with a grin. “Our only desire was to make a buck,” says Murray. “But when it became accepted as a symbol of happiness, we were thrilled.”
The smiley became one of the most recognisable logos of all time. Cartoonists parodied it in newspapers and magazines such as The New Yorker. In 1986, it appeared stained with blood as a central motif of the graphic novel Watchmen. Later that decade, it became an emblem of Britain’s acid-house music scene.
During the Nineties, the Seattle rock band Nirvana created a version with crossed-out eyes and a wobbly line for a mouth. The US retail behemoth Walmart gave a “classic” smiley a starring role in a corporate campaign. Today the smiley appears in the work of artists such as Nate Lowman and Banksy. Most commonly, of course, it is used as an emoticon in countless e-mails and text messages every day.
Who, then, is the genius that dreamed up the smiley? And who profits from it, presumably laughing all the way to the bank? The origins of the smiley are obscure, and much contested, but people sometimes attribute the design to a commercial artist called Harvey Ball, who lived in the American town of Worcester in Massachusetts.
In 1963, Ball was commissioned to create a logo that would boost morale among employees of an insurance company. In less than 10 minutes, he sketched a circular yellow face with two black eyes and a beaming mouth. His design was printed upon tens of thousands of badges given to the company’s salesmen and customers throughout the Sixties. Ball received a fee of US$45 – but he never earned another dollar from his design, despite receiving recognition as the inventor of the smiley before his death in 2001.
But Nicolas Loufrani, a Frenchman who runs Smileyworld, a licensing company that owns the copyright over the smiley in more than 100 companies and has an annual turnover of approximately £90mil (Rm434mil), resists Ball’s claim. He points out that a smiley face was a key feature of a well-known promotional campaign for a radio network on America’s East Coast in the late 50s. Loufrani, whose father trademarked the smiley in France in 1971, considers it the first known appearance of a smiley face in history.
Whatever its origins, the smiley has now been a prominent part of Western visual culture for half a century. Perhaps the secret of its success is its simplicity. What it stands for can be easily moulded by its context. – The Daily Telegraph UK