Smiley Face Essay

1363 Words6 Pages
Death to Traditional Grandfather Smiley Facial expressions are a way to understand how someone might be feeling, but with the variety of expressions from each individual, this can make it hard to identify one emotion. The big yellow smiley face created by Harvey Ball, in 1963, was a simple way to get the right point across with the pure happiness of the smiley, to help boost morale (George, By). This happiness craze took on a new significance with the birth of texting and computer communication. The smiley face found a new meaning, style and way of helping people communicate. The general idea behind the smiley face was to start a morale boosting campaign with a smile, assigned by promotions director Joy Young to Harvey Ball (George, By). In 1970, Bernard and Murray Spain deicide to add the words “have a nice day” to the bright yellow smiley. They were the first to make a business by selling merchandise to the public and creating the smiley fad (Press). Today the idea behind this friendly icon meaning has drastically expanded into emoticons. An emoticon is a, “textual expression representing the face of a writer's mood or facial expression”(What Is Emoticon). With these emoticons people have the power to convey any emotion rather than just happiness. “Grandfather Smiley” that Harvey Ball created seems to be just another face in the crowd of thousands of emoticon. Since the first smiley face, new generations have put their own sparkle to this happy face branching out in colors, and detail. The effortless bright yellow, two dots for eyes and half oval smile of the traditional smiley face has become a cliché and the enjoyable simplicity of this icon has lost its flare. Emoticons are the new style of smiley that even have the ability move on cell phone screens and computer screens, something “Grandfather Smiley” never did before (Animated Emoticons). The new
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