2023-12-12 20:47:51
If you had told Harvey Ball 60 years ago that his creation would one day be known around the world; that he had created a universally understandable symbol that, decades later, would overcome language and cultural barriers like no other; a symbol whose pop culture influence iconographers will likely be analyzing hundreds of years from now; one from which a digital sign language would develop, without which some people today would no longer be able to articulate their own emotional states – if he had been told all this when the graphic designer of an insurance company in the American state of Massachusetts had just created a pin for its employees , he probably wouldn’t have believed it. If he had, he would probably have registered the copyright for his invention, which in retrospect seems so banal and perhaps that is why it was so successful. A yellow circle, two dots as eyes, a line as a mouth: the smiley. A nose would have made him overly complex.
Ball is said to have received $45 from the State Mutual Life Assurance Company for his design for pins that were intended to boost employee morale. He later said he drew a circle with a smile as a mouth on yellow paper because it was sunny and bright. It apparently didn’t even take him ten minutes. And even though one would have to assume that a badge with a grinning face couldn’t have served as a pick-me-up for many depressed insurance salesmen, the badges were a huge success – and with them the smiley face. And since neither Ball nor the insurance company came up with the idea of securing the trademark or copyright for the smiley, he later made others rich.
When the smiley lost his innocence
It took a few more years until two business brothers from Philadelphia recognized its commercial potential. In 1970, Bernard and Murray took Spain Ball’s smiley face, put the slogan “Have a nice day” underneath it, and began producing merchandise in a large-scale industrial style. This brought the Murray brothers a fortune and brought Smiley into the pop culture mainstream. And from there on an eventful journey. The fact that he enjoyed great popularity in the punk scene was probably the first sign that his unwavering grin could mean more than just “Have a nice day”. In the mid-80s he ended up, covered in blood, on the cover of the cult comic “Watchmen”.
He finally lost his innocence when he became a symbol of the burgeoning acid house scene in England a few years later. And thus also a symbol of the chemical substance that fueled the frivolous euphoria of their illegal raves: Ecstasy.
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But that only briefly damaged the image of the smiley. Even today, brands around the world want to use the good mood symbol for themselves. The “Smiley Company” earns money from this, more than $100 million a year. Franklin Loufrani, a French businessman, trademarked a smiley face slightly modified from Ball’s design in 1972 and founded the company.
Ball himself, who died in 2001, probably didn’t earn much more than his $45 from the smiley face. Nevertheless, he held no grudge against the grinning face, founded a foundation that supports children’s charities through the sale of smiley products, and launched World Smile Day on October 1, 1999. The motto: “Do something kind. Help one person smile.” And that, one would like to shout to Ball, cannot be measured in money anyway.
#pin #cultural #phenomenon #years #Smiley