World Smile Day

Harvey Ross Ball (July 10, 1921 – April 12, 2001) was an American commercial artist. He is recognized as the designer of a popular smiley graphic picture, which became an enduring and notable international icon. He never applied for a trademark for the iconic smiley image and only earned $45 for his efforts. Ball later founded the World Smile Foundation in 1999, a non-profit charitable trust that supports children's causes.

Early life

Ball was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, by his parents Ernest G. Ball and Christine ("Kitty") Ross Ball. Ball had five siblings, three younger by the names of Merrit, Virginia, and Raymond, and two older by the names of Jessie and Ernest Jr. During his time as a student at Worcester South High School, he became an apprentice to a local sign painter, and later attended the Worcester Art Museum School, where he studied fine arts.

State Mutual and the birth of the smiley

After World War II, Ball worked for a local advertising firm until he started his own business, Harvey Ball Advertising, in 1959. He designed the smiley in 1963.

The State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) had purchased Guarantee Mutual Company of Ohio. The merger resulted in low employee morale. In an attempt to solve this, Ball was employed in 1963 as a freelance artist, to come up with an image to increase morale. Ball started with a sunny-yellow circle containing a smile, however wasn't happy that it could be turned upside down to make a frown. By adding two eyes, he created a smiley face. The whole drawing took 10 minutes to complete, and earned him $45.

State Mutual had planned to hand out 100 button pins containing the design, however demand quickly soared. The aim was to get employees to smile while using the phone and doing other tasks. Research has since taken place confirming Ball's instincts. The buttons became popular, with orders being taken in lots of 10,000. More than 50 million smiley face buttons had been sold by 1971, and the smiley has been described as an international icon.

By 1971 the smiley face was everywhere, so Ball contacted patent attorneys, who told him the design was now in the public domain. Ball said: "It never bothered me. I figured if I make the world a little happier, OK, fine". Ball's son, Charles, is reported to have said his father never regretted not registering the copyright. Telegram & Gazette reported Charles Ball as saying "he was not a money-driven guy, he used to say, 'Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.'"

Popularity of the smiley

Ball (seated) at a public signing, 1998

The phrase "Have a happy day" became associated with the smiley although it was not part of Ball's original design. Philadelphian brothers Bernard and Murray Spain designed and sold products with the phrase and logo in the early 1970s. They trademarked the combination and later changed the phrase to "Have a nice day", which itself has become a phrase in everyday use in North America.

The smiley was introduced to France in 1972 as a signal of a good news story in the newspaper ''France-Soir''. Frenchman Franklin Loufrani used the image this way and made swift moves to trademark the image. As of 2013, the company turns over $100 million a year and became embroiled in a copyright dispute with Walmart over the image in the 1990s.

The BBC
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