Smiley meaning
The smiley face was drawn in 1963 by Harvey Ball for State Mutual Life Assurance in Worcester. The company paid him forty-five dollars. The job was an internal morale campaign. Ball did not trademark the face. The yellow button is a later product. Watchmen, in 1986, put blood on a badge of the same face.
A face drawn for a morale campaign, for forty-five dollars.
The name. Smiley is the noun the buttons made. Harvey Ball drew a face: a circle, two eyes, a smile. He was paid forty-five dollars by State Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1963. He did not trademark the face. Other people made an industry out of that omission.
Where it comes from
State Mutual wanted a campaign to lift employees after a merger’s bruises. Ball, a commercial artist in Worcester, produced the face quickly. The fee of forty-five dollars is part of the story because it measures the job: a local graphic, not a planned global brand. The face left the building. In the early 1970s yellow buttons with a distorted slogan made the smile a product, associated with Franklin Loufrani’s licensing in Europe and with American button sellers. The legal history of who owns a smile is a thicket. The drawing history is simpler. Ball’s face is 1963, two oval eyes and a creased smile, not the perfect circles of the later buttons. Unicode’s WHITE SMILING FACE, U+263A, ☺, is the typeset average. It is not Ball’s invoice. The lexicon draws a plain face in that average. It does not claim to be the Worcester original, which was a specific piece of commercial art, and it does not use the later trademarked variants.
Modern
A fee is a date
Forty-five dollars is not a moral. It is evidence that the artist was paid for a day’s-scale job and that the client did not think it was buying a century. The century happened anyway, because a simple face is easy to print and hard to own. Ball spent later years saying he had not meant the fever of the buttons. The buttons are a reader. The merger campaign is the origin. A reader can be larger than an origin. It does not replace the invoice.
In fiction
comic · 1986
Blood on the badge
Watchmen (comic, 1986)
Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, opens its imagery with a smiley badge spattered with blood. The badge belongs to the Comedian, a violent man in a story about violent men. The blood is the comic’s sentence: a morale face after the morale has failed. The sentence needs Ball’s face to be already innocent in the reader’s memory. 1963 is that memory. 1986 is the stain. The comic did not design the smile. It counted on the smile and then damaged it. That is a use, and it is one of the clearest uses in this cabinet, because the damage is the point and the point is visible.
WatchmenIn popular culture
film · 1994
Forrest Gump
Forrest wipes his muddy face on a T-shirt and 'invents' the smiley.
Harvey Ball drew it in 1963 for $45.
Sourcemusic · 1991
Nirvana
The x-eyed, tongue-out smiley; authorship disputed between Cobain's estate and designer Robert Fisher, settled 2024.
Radio X / Far Out.
Sourcemusic · 1988
Bomb the Bass, 'Beat Dis'
Put the Watchmen blood-spattered smiley on the sleeve and handed the face to acid house.
Put the Watchmen blood-spattered smiley on the sleeve and handed the face to acid house, which is a later reading of the mark.
Sourcegame · 1980
Pac-Man
A yellow face eating its way through the decade.
A yellow face eating its way through the decade, which is a later reading of the mark.
SourceQuestions
What does the Smiley mean?
The smiley face was drawn in 1963 by Harvey Ball for State Mutual Life Assurance in Worcester. The company paid him forty-five dollars. The job was an internal morale campaign. Ball did not trademark the face. The yellow button is a later product. Watchmen, in 1986, put blood on a badge of the same face.
How do I type the Smiley?
The character is ☺ (U+263A).
Why does Watchmen use the smiley?
Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, opens its imagery with a smiley badge spattered with blood. The badge belongs to the Comedian, a violent man in a story about violent men.
Why does Forrest Gump use the smiley?
Forrest wipes his muddy face on a T-shirt and 'invents' the smiley. Harvey Ball drew it in 1963 for $45.
Near this
Sources
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
Your margin
Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.
symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 20 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.