Smiley

Cultural/Communication

The original yellow circular face icon created by Harvey Ball in 1963, which inspired the design of modern face emoji.

The smiley face — a yellow circle with two dot eyes and a curved mouth — was designed by Harvey Ball in 1963 for an insurance company's employee morale campaign. It became a cultural icon of the 1970s and beyond.

When emoji were first designed for mobile phones, the smiley face was the natural template for face emoji. The yellow skin tone used for default emoji is a direct reference to the classic smiley.

Today, "smiley" is sometimes used colloquially to refer to any face emoji, though strictly it refers to the classic 🙂 or 😊 designs.

Related Terms

Emoticon Emoticon
A text-based representation of a facial expression using standard keyboard characters, such as :-) or :D, predating graphical emoji.

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