Harvey Ball
Harvey Ball
The World Smile Day is celebrated on the first Friday in the month of October every year. The idea of was coined and initiated by Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts. He is known to have created the Smiley Face in 1963. The World's first World Smile Day was held in the year 1999 and has been held annually since.
History
Harvey Ball was based in Asia and the Pacific during World War II and was awarded the Bronze Star for heroism during the Battle of Okinawa. He served 27 years in the National Guard, retired as a brigadier general in 1973 and then served six years in the Army Reserves. He retired as a full colonel in 1979. Ball was awarded the Veteran of the Year award from the Worcester Veterans Council in 1999.
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 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. What he created was a smiley face, with one eye bigger than the other. In less than ten minutes, Harvey Ball came up with the simple yet world-changing smiley face. The simplicity of the image brought smiles to the faces of the executives, who paid him $45 for his creation.
The use of the smiley face became part of the company's friendship campaign whereby State Mutual handed out 100 smiley pins to employees. The aim was to get employees to smile while using the phone and doing other tasks. 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.
Ball never applied for a trademark or copyright of the smiley and earned just $45 for his work. State Mutual, similarly, did not make any money from the design. Ball's son, Charles, is reported to have said his father never regretted not registering the copyright.
From smiley to icon
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. His company now turns over $100 million a year and became embroiled in a copyright dispute with Walmart over the image in the 1990s.
Distinguishing features of smiley face
An authentic Harvey Ball smiley face can always be identified by three distinguishing features: Narrow oval eyes, with the right one larger than the left, bright sunny yellow, and a slightly off center mouth, which has been attributed to being similar to a "Mona Lisa Mouth".
Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation
After Harvey died in 2001, the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation was created to honor his name and memory, with the slogan "improving this world, one smile at a time." The Foundation continues as the official sponsor of World Smile Day each year.
The organization states that their goal is to "make as many people as possible aware of World Smile Day by using the web, social media, and your help to encourage smiles and acts of kindness around the world."
World Smile Day continues to be celebrated every year in Worcester with a hot air balloon, sidewalk chalk activities, and the world largest human smiley face. Additionally, world smile day is celebrated around the world by individuals, schools, businesses, and organizations trying to make the world a better place by delivering meals, making videos, and much more.
Harvey Ross Ball was an American commercial artist. He is recognized as the earliest known designer of the smiley, which became an enduring and notable international icon. Ball was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. 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.
Posthumous
Ball died on April 12, 2001, aged 79, as a result of liver failure following a short illness.
The land that was owned by the Ball Family, off Granite Street in Worcester, was purchased by the City of Worcester in June 2007, with help from Mass Audubon and a $500,000 grant from the state Executive Office of Environmental Affairs' Division of Conservation Services. This property links Mass Audubon's Broad Meadow Brook Sanctuary with the developing Blackstone River Bikeway. It is now known as the "Harvey Ball Conservation Area" and is home to the appropriately named "Smiley Face Trail."
Hello @lndesta120282. how's your weekend?
I never thought who invented such a popular thing as a smiling smiley. This is a positive and kind person who contributed to the daily life of descendants. How does this affect us? It's simple, he created something than many use.
I liked reading his biography. Now I have expanded my knowledge.
Thank you, good article
it's your job to spread happiness... I try my best to do this... thanks for your post @indesta120282
Someone invents something but isn't knowledgeable about legal procedures, then some degenerate comes along and steals the idea and makes a ton of money and they call it innovation. -_-
Harvey Ball might not be a household name, but he created one of the most recognizable icons in the world. Ten years after his death, we bring you 10 things you might not know about the creator of the Smiley Face.
Harvey Ball was born on July 10, 1921 in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating from Worcester South High School he became apprentice to a local sign painter before eventually studying fine arts at the Worcester Art Museum School.
During World War II, Ball served in Asia and the Pacific and was awarded the Bronze Star for Heroism during the Battle of Okinawa (he would go on to serve in the National Guard for much of his life, reaching the rank of colonel before retiring in 1979). After the war ended, Ball went to work for an advertising firm in Worcester. In 1959, he started his own company, Harvey Ball Advertising.
In 1963, the State Mutual Life Insurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts bought the Guarantee Mutual Insurance Company of Ohio and the merger resulted in low employee morale. Promotions director Joy Young was assigned with creating a visual icon to accompany a ‘friendship campaign’ the company hoped would improve the situation.
She hired Ball to sketch something to be used on buttons, and Ball came up with a smiley face on a bright yellow background. The original design consisted only of a grinning mouth but Ball, realizing the button could easily be inverted to send the wrong (i.e. “frowny”) message, decided to add eyeballs. The left eye was deliberately created slightly smaller than the right in order to humanize the drawing through its imperfection. The design took him less than 10 minutes to complete. He was paid $45 for his work. Neither Ball nor the insurance company bothered to copyright the creation. In an interview with the Telegram & Gazette, Harvey’s son Charles Ball said his father never regretted the missed revenue opportunity. “He was not a money-driven guy,” said Charles.
The original button had only a 7/8-inch radius. State Mutual Life Insurance first produced only 100 buttons for employees, but soon clients began requesting them and the company started ordering the buttons in batches of 10,000. Later that year, a syndicated TV show called “The Funny Company” would feature a TV character with a Smiley Face logo pinned on its hat, bringing it further exposure.
In the early 1970s, brothers Bernard and Murray Spain added the tagline “Have a happy day” (later amended to “Have a nice day”) and copyrighted the logo/slogan combination. The Smiley Face button then became a national fad lasting nearly two years before peaking in 1972. By that time, the Spain brothers had sold an estimated 50 million Smiley Face buttons – not to mention Smiley Face posters, coffee mugs, T-shirts, etc.
Beginning in 1996, retail behemoth Walmart started using the Smiley Face in stores and later in TV ads. They then tried to claim ownership of the design. Lawyers would unsmilingly litigate the case for 10 years before a judge ruled against Walmart in 2006 (exhorting them, one hopes, to “have a nice day” just before lowering his gavel).
“Smiley has become so commercialized that its original message of spreading good will and good cheer has all but disappeared,” Harvey Ball said in 1999, announcing the formation of the World Smile Corporation. “I needed to do something to change that.” The World Smile Corporation was created to promote “World Smile Day,” held every year on the first Friday in October. The event helps raise money for the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation, a charitable trust that supports various children’s causes. Its slogan is “Do an act of kindness – help one person smile!”
In 1993, David Stern, a former ad man turned Seattle mayoral candidate, claimed in campaign ads to have invented the Smiley Face for a local savings and loan company in 1967. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called his bluff, and he lost the election.
Harvey Ball died on April 12, 2001 of liver failure at the age of 79. Nearly 50 years after commissioning its creation, the company now known as Worcester Mutual Fire Insurance still uses his Smiley Face in its promo materials.
note: these are collected
But i feel a salute for him from my heart..
Absolutely right sir. another salute for her.
A lot of blessings.
Smile please 😊
He is a great man that make other happy and introduced this great day :)