The Classic Yellow Smiley Face Doesn’t Have the Happiest Story

The classic smiley face is one of the most instantly recognizable bits of graphic design ever. And so, you’d probably assume that the guy who created it is absolutely filthy stinkin’ rich. After all, if your job is to create visual design that resonates, and you end up with something on par with the Nike swoosh or the Golden Arches, you should be set for life.

But alas, that wasn’t the fate of Harvey Ball, the man who first sketched out the classic yellow smiley face.

Back in 1963, Ball had been hired to create a graphic for an insurance company that wanted to cheer up its employees. Now, whether slapping smiling faces all over a workplace is ever going to send a vibe that doesn’t feel straight out of cautionary sci-fi is debatable. Nevertheless, Ball fired off a simple, yellow, smiling face, and handed it over for the grand sum of $45. They couldn’t even scrape together an even 50?

The insurance outfit in question, State Mutual Life Assurance Company, took Ball’s self-satisfied little circle and put it onto buttons, which were an immediate hit. Pivoting from a workplace poster to merch seems like something that could have been covered with at least a half-assed contract. Nothing, not even a design that’s the purest expression of simple joy that somehow speaks to every human soul, can exist without someone trying to turn it into a dead-eyed trademark. Yet the first duo to do so weren’t Ball, but Hallmark employees Bernard and Murray Spain, who figured out that by slapping “Have A Happy Day” under the face, they’d be able to copyright it despite Ball’s design obviously carrying the weight.

The moment that the smiley face truly died, however, was when it was made the subject of an attempted legal coup by Walmart, a company that’s spent its existence finding more efficient ways to convert worker blood into shitty children’s tricycles and discounted bulk diapers through cruel alchemy. Their opponent in that legal case? Another interloper by the name of Franklin Loufrani, who was bold enough to just straight up declare himself the original creator, and start “The Smiley Company,” which was raking in cash to the tune of almost a half-million dollars a year as recently as 2017.

So what about Ball? Well, he passed away in 2001. His son, though, has taken it upon himself to reclaim the smiley face, using his father’s legacy to found the charity The World Smile Foundation in his honor. A nonprofit organization held in the hands of the family of the only man that should have made any profit off the smiley face in the first place.