Outlying Islands U. I agree to be emailed. At Large June 3, Peggy Carouthers. View this post on Instagram. About the Author. Peggy Carouthers. Latest News. Explaining the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World are legendary sculptural and….
Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work. Twenty-four exemplary works acquired over the last two years from the Souls…. There was, however, a graphic designer, some devious salesmen, and an ambitious newspaper man — all add up to a surprisingly complex history for such a simple graphic. Ball came up with the image in when he was commissioned to create a graphic to raise morale among the employees of an insurance company after a series of difficult mergers and acquisitions.
The State Mutual Life Assurance Company now Allmerica Financial Corporation made posters, buttons, and signs adorned with the jaundiced grin in the attempt to get their employees to smile more.
Neither Ball nor State Mutual tried to trademark or copyright the design. In the early s, brothers Bernard and Murray Spain, owners of two Hallmark card shops in Philadelphia, came across the image in a button shop, noticed that it was incredibly popular, and simply appropriated it.
The Smiley was an icon worth mutilating, and the cover for the UK inch of the Talking Heads' Psycho Killer picked up on the Taxi Driver vibe that would later inform Watchmen with an image of a distorted Smiley on the putative killer's T-shirt. Behind the podium were large red, white and black banners: in place of swastikas were large Smileys. Written during and published in , Watchmen used the Smiley as a visual metaphor for a narrative that examines guilt, failure, megalomania and compromise with a corrupt power structure.
All is not well beneath the idealised superhero surface, as the novel spirals into an existential crisis of betrayal, mass extinction, the transience of human existence. The Smiley is worn by the most corrupt and violent superhero, The Comedian. It even travels to Mars, when Jon and Laurie end up in the midst of a rock formation shaped like a Smiley.
Life followed art, as in early February it was reported that an orbiting satellite had spotted a big Smiley drawn on the face of the red planet. Then came the explosion. In February , Bomb The Bass released the first pop reference to Watchmen, using the blood-stained logo on the cover of their hit Beat Dis.
In the previous month, Danny Rampling had used the Smiley in a flyer for his club Shoom. He'd got the idea from seeing the designer Barnzley at the Wag Club in a shirt covered "in a lot of smiley faces". Embedded into the second "o" in Shoom, the symbol took a few weeks to catch on, but when it did, it swept the country as the logo of acid fashion.
As acid house became acieed that year, the Smiley flip-flopped from dream symbol to harbinger of wickedness. Just as the early days of acid were beatific, so the media's initial response to this new youth cult was positive. This changed in the autumn as "smiley culture" was associated with headlines like "Evil Of Ecstasy" and "Shoot These Drug Barons", and the fad quickly subsided. This negative association continued into the early s. The company produced thousands of buttons and signs, setting the stage for Hallmark reps Bernard and Murray Spain to swoop in in the early s and copyright the design with the slogan "Have a Happy Day.
At its core, the smiley is like any other symbol -- a visual that has been assigned a specific meaning. Why have these symbols at all? Marcel Danesi, an anthropology and semiotics professor at the University of Toronto, said that symbols are like "little capsules [that] tell us what things are about -- in our own terms.
We live by symbols. The power of the emoji, Japan's most transformative modern design. The stability of this system is up for debate; symbols often exhibit the pliable quality of Play-Doh.
On its face, the smiley is simple and feelgood, easy to learn and reproduce. In the right context, it elicits that giddy childhood rush -- the morale boost that inspired the image from the start.
But stretched this way or that, the icon quickly becomes surreal. As Jon Savage penned for The Guardian in , the smiley "presented such a fixed facade of childlike contentment that it was ripe for subversion. Over the years, the icon has been reimagined by bands like Nirvana and the Talking Heads, and it flourished in the rave culture of the '80s and '90s, imprinted on ecstasy pills and flyers for acid house DJs.
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