Smiley FacesA Short History of the Smiley Face
The yellow smiley face as we know it was drawn in 1963 by American commercial artist Harvey Ball, and it has been reinvented roughly once a generation since: as a 1970s button craze, as a typed :-) on early computer networks, and as the emoji in every phone keyboard today. Here is the short version of how a ten-minute design job became one of the most recognised images on the planet.
Before the smiley: faces made of punctuation
People were playing with typographic faces long before anyone drew a yellow circle. In March 1881 the American satirical magazine Puck printed a set of "typographical art" faces built from punctuation marks, showing joy, melancholy, indifference and astonishment. These were jokes about what a printer could do with a type case, not a system for showing tone, but they show the idea is old.
1963: Harvey Ball's yellow face
In 1963 the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, asked local artist Harvey Ball to design something to lift staff morale. Ball drew a bright yellow circle with two oval eyes and a curved smile. It reportedly took him about ten minutes, and he was paid $45.
The company printed the face on buttons, posters and desk cards. Ball never registered the design as his own, so it spread freely. Later in life he set up the World Smile Foundation, and the first World Smile Day was held in 1999. It still falls on the first Friday of October. Ball died in 2001.
The 1970s: a nationwide craze
By 1971 the smiley had become a full-blown fad in the United States. Many different manufacturers put the face on buttons, mugs, T-shirts and stickers, often paired with the slogan "Have a nice day". It became shorthand for upbeat, slightly cheesy optimism.
Late 1980s: rave culture
In the UK, the smiley picked up a very different meaning in the late 1980s, when it became a symbol of acid house and the dance-music scene during the so-called Second Summer of Love. The same cheerful face now meant "party", and it appeared on flyers and clothing across the club scene.
1982: the smiley goes digital
On 19 September 1982 at 11:44, computer scientist Scott Fahlman posted a short message to an online bulletin board ("bboard") at Carnegie Mellon University. Discussions there kept going wrong when people missed that a comment was a joke. His fix: "I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways." He suggested :-( for things that were not jokes.
The idea spread quickly across early computer networks and grew into a whole vocabulary of emoticons, from the wink ;-) to the shorter, noseless :). You can read more about how these relate to modern emoji in smileys vs emoticons vs emoji.
Smileys inside the computer
Smiling faces also turned up as characters built into computers. The original IBM PC character set (code page 437, 1981) included a white and a black smiling face as two of its very first characters. When Unicode 1.1 was released in 1993, it included ☺ White Smiling Face (U+263A) and ☻ Black Smiling Face (U+263B). Plenty of other everyday marks took a similar path from type case to keyboard; see this overview of writing and text symbols.
1999: emoji arrive
In Japan, designer Shigetaka Kurita created a set of 176 tiny pictures, each just 12 × 12 pixels, for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service in 1999. They included faces, weather symbols, hearts and everyday objects. Kurita's set was long thought to be the very first emoji, though an earlier, little-used set of 90 emoji appeared on a SoftBank phone in 1997. In 2016 the Museum of Modern Art in New York added Kurita's original 176 emoji to its collection.
2010: emoji go global
Japanese carriers each had their own emoji, which did not work across networks or outside Japan. That changed when Unicode 6.0 was released in October 2010 with a standard set of 722 emoji, including 😂 Face with Tears of Joy (U+1F602) and 😇 Smiling Face with Halo (U+1F607). Once phone and computer makers adopted the standard, emoji could travel anywhere. In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries chose 😂 as its Word of the Year.
Where animated smileys fit in
Alongside the standardised emoji, forums and message boards in the 2000s built their own libraries of animated GIF smileys: faces that wave, dance, laugh and eat popcorn. They do things a single emoji cannot, like a little popcorn-eating smiley settling in to watch a thread unfold, or a cheerleader smiley shaking pom-poms. They are still a fun way to add personality to a post, and the design idea behind them is the same one Harvey Ball had in 1963: a simple round face that makes people feel a bit better.
