The Lessons We Learn From the Smiley Face

The yellow smiley face was first designed in 1963. State Mutual Life Insurance hired the designer, Harvey Ball, to create the logo attached to a company-wide “make friends” campaign after a merger decimated morale. They paid him $45 for the creation of two eyes, a smile, and a yellow circle.

Nobody trademarked the smiley face, although plenty of found ways to copyright specific expressions of it. In 1970 the Spain brothers, Murray and Bernard, appended the words “Have a Happy Day” underneath and made a killing selling merchandise with the ubiquitous symbol. Contemporary operating systems all agree that the smiley face is a useful icon or emoji, now represented by the ascii digits of a colon and a closing bracket — 🙂 — but each system has its own expression of those emojis when the OS interprets the characters and translates them into graphics.

As you might expect, the smiley face is a copyright nightmare once you dig into its origins. The Spain brothers took credit for the creation on national TV when appearing on Whats My Line in the seventies, despite knowing good and well that the originator was Ball. A second group attempted to take ownership of the design in 1971, when a French journalist launched The Smiley Company (and they seem to have been successful, with the Smiley Company fending off a copyright claim by Walmart in over 100 countries back in 2005). In 2001, Harvey Ball’s son Charlie started a non-profit dedicated to reclaiming the rights to his father’s work.

I love the history of the smiley face because it touches upon so many of my favourite mantras for writers:

• Take care of your copyrights
• Never think you can predict which work will take off
• Never doubt that a simple idea can be great
• And, sometimes, even Capitalism can’t contain the right idea hitting at the right time