In the movie Forrest Gump by Robert Zemekis from 65438 to 0994, Forrest Gump traveled all over the country and stumbled into the history books.
Once, he met a poor T-shirt salesman. Forrest Gump recalled, "I tried to print my face on a T-shirt, but he didn't draw well and didn't have a camera." Fortunately, a truck passed by, splashing mud all over Forrest Gump's face. He wiped his face on a yellow T-shirt, then returned it to the lucky entrepreneur and told him "Have a nice day". The mark on Forrest Gump's face left a perfect abstract smiling face on the bright yellow T-shirt. Then, an icon was born.
As you might expect, this is not the way to create an iconic smiling face. No cross-country runners, no struggling T-shirt salesmen, no trucks and mud pits. However, there is a graphic designer, some cunning salesmen, and an ambitious reporter, all of which add up to an amazingly complicated history for such a simple graphic.
People basically believe that the original version of this familiar smiling face was the late javi ros Bauer, an American graphic artist and an advertiser in Worcester, Massachusetts, 50 years ago. Bauer put forward this image in 1963, when he was ordered to create a graphic to improve the staff morale of an insurance company after a series of difficult mergers and acquisitions. Bauer completed the design in less than 10 minutes, and his salary was $45. National Mutual Life Insurance Company (now Allmerica Financial Company) made posters, buttons and signs decorated with biased smiles in an attempt to make employees smile more. It is not clear whether the new trademark can boost morale, but smiling faces are immediately popular, and the company has produced thousands of buttons. This photo is endless, and of course it has been imitated by countless people. However, according to Bill Wallace, executive director of Worcester History Museum, the real smiling face designed by Harvey Bauer can always be recognized by its unique features: the eyes are long and narrow oval, one is bigger than the other, and the mouth is not a perfect arc, but it is "almost like the mouth of Mona Lisa".
Neither the ball nor the country tried to design trademarks or copyrights with each other. Although Bauer obviously has the second representative smile in history, there is more to this story.
Harvey Bauer is a national mutual life insurance company (photo: ** iley Company).
In the early 1970s, brothers Bernard and Mori Spanish, the owners of two hallmark greeting card shops in Philadelphia, saw this photo in a button shop and found it very popular, so they took it for themselves. They knew that Harvey Bauer designed it in the 1960s, but after adding the slogan "I wish you happiness" to the smile, the Spanish brothers got the copyright to modify the logo at 197 1 and immediately began to produce their own novel products. By the end of this year, they had sold more than 50 million buttons and countless other products, and made a profit while trying to help restore a country's optimism during the Vietnam War (or providing ironic decorations for soldiers' helmets). Although the brothers acknowledged Harvey's design, when they appeared on the TV program "What's My Line" at 197 1, the brothers publicly praised icon. In Europe, in the French newspaper "French Evening News" (photo: Smiling Face Company)
Smiling faces are used to emphasize good news.
There is another applicant. 1972, French journalist Franklin Loufrani began to use this logo to highlight the rare good news of the French Evening News and became the first person to register for commercial use. Subsequently, he registered the smiley face trademark in 100 countries, and launched the smiley face company by selling smiley face T-shirts. 1996, Loufrani's son Nicolas took over the family business and turned it into an empire. He formalized the trademark with a style guide and further distributed it through a global licensing agreement, perhaps the most famous being some of the earliest graphics and characters. Today, Smiley's annual income exceeds $65.438+$300 million, making it one of the 654.38+000 authorized companies in the world. The company adopted a simple graphic gesture and turned it into a huge enterprise and attached importance to the "enthusiasm" business philosophy. As for the American origin of smiling face, Nicholas Rufran expressed doubts about Harvey's design ideas, although as shown in the above picture, his father's original image in the newspaper was almost identical to Bauer's logo and characteristics. Rufrani believes that the design of smiling face is so basic that it can't be attributed to anyone. On his company's website, they showed what they claimed was the world's first smiling face, a stone carving found in a French cave dating back to 2500 BC, and a picture of smiling face used by a radio station in new york in 1960 to prove this idea.
Copyright and trademark issues are very complicated. Although they have different views on Bauer's design, when smillie tried to establish the trademark of this image in the United States at 1997, they were involved in a legal battle with Wal-Mart. 1996, the company began to use smiling face as the company logo, and tried to claim the ownership of smiling face (of course, because they did). The lawsuit lasted 10 years, and both parties lost millions. In 2007, the two sides reached an out-of-court settlement, but its terms have not been made public.
200 1 Charlie Bauer tried to save his father's optimistic legacy from bad deeds by setting up the World Smile Foundation and donating money to grassroots charities, but these charities received little attention and funding in other aspects.
The cover of Watcher 1 is written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Gibbons.
This yellow smiley face, created in 1963, has (probably) caused thousands of changes, from pillows and posters to perfume and pop art, and its meaning has changed with the changes of social and cultural values: from optimistic information of an insurance company in the 1960s to signs of commercialization, to ironic fashion declarations, to carnival cultural symbols printed on * *, and then to silent emotional expression in short messages. In the groundbreaking ic Watcher, the theme of a smiling face covered with blood is a criticism of American politics to some extent. The superheroes in this dystopian world are depressed and traumatized. Perhaps the night watchman artist Dave Gibbons can best explain the mystery of the smiling face: "It's just a yellow area with three marks on it. It couldn't be simpler. So to this extent, it is empty. I'm ready. If you put it in the nursery … it fits. If you wear it on the gas mask of riot police, it hides something completely different.
Source:
Smiling Man, BBC Radio://bbc.co.uk/programs/b 01bh91h; Smiling face company,://* * iley company. /shop/； Thomas crampton, "Smiling face is serious to the company", * * * (July 5, 2006); "Harvey Ball", * * *,: //en. Wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey ball. "