Product information The smiley, smiley face, or happy face, is a stylized representation of a smiling human face, commonly represented as a yellow circle with two dots representing eyes and a half circle representing the mouth. “Smiley” is also sometimes used as a generic term for any emoticon. The very earliest known examples of the graphic are attributed to Harvey Ball, a commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts. He devised the face in 1963 for an insurance firm that wanted an internal campaign to improve employee morale. Ball never attempted to use, promote or trademark the image; it fell into the public domain in the United States before that could be accomplished. As a result, Ball never made any profit for the iconic image beyond his initial $45 fee. David Stern of David Stern Inc., a Seattle-based advertising agency also claimed to have created the smiley. Stern reportedly developed his version in 1967 as part of an ad campaign for Washington Mutual, but says he did not think to trademark it. The graphic was popularized in the early 1970s by Bernard and Murray Spain, who seized upon it in a campaign to sell novelty items. The two produced buttons as well as coffee mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers and many other items emblazoned with the symbol and the phrase "Have a happy day" (devised by Gyula Bogar). It can show many different emotions. The smiley is largely associated in the UK with the acid house dance music culture that emerged during the second summer of love in the late 1980s, often used as engraved logos on ecstasy tablets at the time. The association was cemented when the band Bomb The Bass used an extracted, blood-splattered smiley from the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore, on the centre of their Beat Dis hit single.   Photos