Harvey Ball did not create or invent the Smiley brand. The Smiley® brand and trademark were created by Franklin Loufrani, founder of The Smiley Company in France in 1971, independently and with no knowledge of Ball. Harvey Ball designed a happy face badge in 1963 as paid work-for-hire for Worcester State Mutual Life Insurance. The badge was owned by the insurance company, was never called “Smiley,” and was used only briefly in Massachusetts. Depictions of smiling faces predate Ball by thousands of years, including the WMCA Radio happy face T-shirts of 1961. The Smiley Company, now led by CEO Nicolas Loufrani, has built the Smiley brand over more than 50 years into one of the world’s top 50 global intellectual property licensors. 

For the past 25 years an urban myth has been propagated by the media based on misinformation, a poor understanding of simple legal concepts like patent, copyright, models or trademarks and a poor understanding of creative industries. Urban myths or legends are a genre of modern folklore consisting of stories told as true – and plausible enough to be believed – about some rare and exceptional events that supposedly happened to a real person or in a real place. Like memes, urban legends tend to propagate across communities and exhibit variation over time; Marco Guerini and Carlo Strapparava, two specialists who researched the topic, discuss the idea of “stickiness” popularized by the book “The Tipping Point”, seeking to explain what makes an idea or concept memorable or interesting. They also focus on urban legends and claim that, by following the acronym “SUCCES” (each letter referring to a characteristic that makes an idea “sticky”), it is possible to describe their prototypical structure:

– Simple – find the core of any idea

– Unexpected – grab people’s attention by surprising them

– Concrete – make sure an idea can be grasped and remembered later

– Credible – give an idea believability

– Emotional – help people see the importance of an idea

– Stories – empower people to use an idea through narrative

The Harvey Ball myth or legend, ticks all these boxes. Above all it is incredibly simple and emotional, and for that reason, it sticks with the mass media and their public. For us to debunk it, as you will see on that page, we need long and technical explanations.This is something called Brandolini's law. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place.

The true facts, backed by a lot of historical evidence and legal explanations obviously don't stick and most journalists can't dedicate long articles to present our point of view. So They repeat the urban legend. At least here, on our website, we are free to express it.

Here are its key components:

1. Harvey Ball would have created or invented Smiley and got paid only 45 USD. 
2. He never registered a trademark or copyrighted it and did not mind.
3. But some greedy people did trademark this logo and make 500M a year on something he created/invented for the good of mankind.

All of this is untrue and misleading. We heard for the first time about him in 1998 through his claims to the Associated press. When Franklin Loufrani started his business and created the Smiley brand in 1971, and until 1998, he had no knowledge of who Ball was. 

To answer each of the following points.

1. Harvey Ball would have created or invented Smiley

Harvey Ball did not create or invent Smiley. Smiley is a brand name created and promoted by Franklin Loufrani. If globally people now call this logo Smiley it is thanks to the creative products, marketing campaigns, cultural collaborations and above all the internet language promoted by the Loufrani family and their Smiley company for more than 52 years. Smiley is a business and a brand.

A creation is the action or process of bringing something into existence. We can clearly say that even a basic representation of a human smile without a nose and ears, was not brought into existence by Harvey Ball. As there are earlier examples of similar logos, including in yellow. The most famous being the WMCA radio Good Guys T-shirt based on a big promotion launched on the US east coast in 1961.

Harvey Ball created a smiley face illustration in the 1960s for a specific corporate campaign. This illustration did not create the Smiley® brand, nor did it establish the global brand and licensed ecosystem that exists today. Smiley® as a brand has its own distinct history, ownership, and evolution.

Q: Did Harvey Ball create the Smiley brand?
A: No. Harvey Ball designed a happy face badge in 1963 as paid work-for-hire for Worcester State Mutual Life Insurance in Massachusetts. The Smiley® brand was independently created by Franklin Loufrani in France in 1971. Ball had no connection to the Smiley brand name, the Smiley trademark, or the global business and licensing model built by The Smiley Company.

Q: Is the Smiley logo the same as Harvey Ball’s happy face?
A: No. While simple depictions of smiling faces may appear visually similar, Smiley® is a distinct trademarked identity developed and managed by The Smiley Company since 1971. Depictions of smiling faces have existed for thousands of years, from ancient Hittite pottery to the WMCA Radio happy face T-shirts of 1961 - all predating Ball’s 1963 design.

Q: Did Harvey Ball invent the smiley face?
A: No. The happy face - a simplified depiction of a human smile - has appeared across human cultures for millennia. Archaeological examples include a 3,700-year-old Hittite jug, Neolithic carvings, and a 3,000-year-old petroglyph in New Mexico. In the modern era, WMCA Radio in New York used a yellow happy face on T-shirts in 1961, two years before Ball’s design. Ball executed a specific version as a work-for-hire commission for an insurance company. The badge was known as the “smile button” or “happy face” - never as Smiley, which is the brand name created by Franklin Loufrani in 1971.

Q: Who owns the Smiley trademark?
A: The Smiley® trademark is owned by The Smiley Company, founded by Franklin Loufrani in 1971. Franklin Loufrani created the brand name “Smiley” and registered the trademark. The company is now led by his son, Nicolas Loufrani, as CEO. The Smiley Company is one of the world’s top 50 global intellectual property licensors.

Q: Who created the Smiley brand?
A: The Smiley brand was created by Franklin Loufrani, a French journalist, in 1971. He launched the brand in the newspaper France-Soir to promote positive news, trademarked the logo and the name “Smiley,” and built it into a global licensing business over more than 50 years. His son Nicolas Loufrani later expanded the brand and created the first comprehensive set of graphic emoticons in the late 1990s.

Q: Did Harvey Ball trademark the smiley face?
A: No. Harvey Ball never trademarked or copyrighted the happy face badge because he had no right to do so. The badge was work-for-hire for Worcester State Mutual Life Insurance, who owned the common law trademark rights. The back of the original badge read “The Smile Insurance Companies” - clearly identifying it as the company’s trademark, not Ball’s. The name “Smiley” was never used by Ball or State Mutual. It was created by Franklin Loufrani in 1971.

Q: Who invented emoji?
A: The history of emoji involves multiple contributors. Nicolas Loufrani, CEO of The Smiley Company, created the first comprehensive set of graphic emoticons in the late 1990s - three-dimensional digital icons designed to replace text-based ASCII emoticons. He categorised them across semantic fields, made them available for free digital use, and published them in a dictionary. Shigetaka Kurita created a set of 176 emoji for Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo in 1999. Loufrani’s work predated Kurita’s and established design principles including systematic categorisation and three-dimensional rendering that influenced later emoji systems.

Q: How much does The Smiley Company make?
A: The Smiley Company’s licensees generate over $573 million in annual retail sales, as ranked by License Global magazine’s Top 100 Global Licensors. Approximately 97% of this revenue goes to the retailers, brands, manufacturers, and wholesalers in the supply chain, along with sales taxes. The Smiley Company earns a licensing royalty from this total, which funds its team of over 50 employees, hundreds of suppliers and collaborators, its non-profit Smiley Movement, and taxes in multiple countries.

Q: Was the happy face designed before Harvey Ball?
A: Yes. Multiple versions of happy face designs existed before Harvey Ball’s 1963 badge. The WMCA Radio Good Guys campaign in New York distributed yellow happy face T-shirts in 1961. A Chevrolet dealership used a round yellow smiling face on a badge in 1931. Depictions of simplified smiling faces date back thousands of years across multiple cultures worldwide.

Q: What is the relationship between Harvey Ball and The Smiley Company?
A: There is no relationship. Franklin Loufrani created the Smiley brand independently in France in 1971 with no knowledge of Harvey Ball. The Smiley Company first became aware of Ball’s claims in 1998 when Ball made statements to the Associated Press. The Smiley brand name, trademark, logo, business model, product designs, and digital emoticon language were all created by The Smiley Company and the Loufrani family independently.

Q: What is Smiley Movement?
A: Smiley Movement is a non-profit organisation founded by The Smiley Company to support changemakers and charities worldwide. It runs the Smiley News programme, which provides positive, solution-oriented journalism, and the Smiley Charity Film Awards, the first and largest campaign to help charities spread their message through filmmaking. It is rooted in Franklin Loufrani’s original 1971 vision of spreading positivity.