Harvey Ross Ball 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.
Early life
Ball was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, by his parents Ernest G. Ball and Christine or 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 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. 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.'"
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. The BBC broadcast a radio documentary on 4 February 2012 called Smiley's People that covered the story of the smiley.
Promotion
On July 18, 1998, around the 35th anniversary of the design's inception, Ball appeared at That's Entertainment to meet fans and sign smiley pins and art. At this appearance Ball was shown copies of the graphic novel Watchmen issue #1, which featured a notorious image of a smiley face with a splatter of blood across it. Store Manager Ken Carson was quoted as saying Ball seemed amused to see it on the cover.
Ball founded the World Smile Foundation in 1999 a non-profit charitable trust that supports children's causes. The group licenses Smileys and organizes World Smile Day, which takes place on the first Friday of October each year and is a day dedicated to "good cheer and good works". The catchphrase for the day is "Do an act of kindness - help one person smile".
Death and legacy
Ball died on April 12, 2001 as a result of liver failure following a short illness. He was 79. He left behind his wife for 54 years, Winifred Trudell, and four children. 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".
Distinguishing features of Ball's smiley face
A Harvey Ball smiley face can be identified by three distinguishing features: Narrow oval eyes, a bright sunny yellow color, and a mouth that is not a perfect arc, which has been claimed to be similar to a "Mona Lisa Mouth". The face has creases at the sides of the mouth, and the mouth is slightly off-center and the right side of the mouth is slightly thicker than on the left.
