пятница, 12 ноября 2010 г.

История смайлика

Смайликами (от smile — улыбка) в Интернете называют значки, составленные из знаков препинания, букв и цифр, обозначающие какие-то эмоции. У смайлика есть автор.
Harvey Ross Ball (10 July 1921 – 12 April 2001) was an American commercial artist. He is recognized as the earliest known designer of the Smiley, which became an enduring and notable international icon. Ball was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. During his time as a student at South High School, he became an apprentice to local sign painter, and later attended Worcester Art Museum School, where he studied fine arts. His design of the Smiley came about in 1963. The State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts (now known as Hanover Insurance) purchased Guarantee Mutual Company of Ohio. The merger resulted in low employee morale. In an attempt to solve this, Harvey Ball was employed in 1963 as a freelance artist to create a smiley face to be used on buttons, desk cards, and posters. In less than ten minutes the smiley face was complete. The use of the smiley face was a part of the company's friendship campaign whereby State Mutual handed out 100 smiley pins to employees. The aim was to get employees to smile while using the phone and doing other tasks. The buttons were highly popular, with orders in lots of 10,000.
More than 50 million Smiley Face buttons were sold by 1971, and the smiley has been described as an international icon. Ball never applied for a trademark or copyright of the smiley and earned just $45 for his work. State Mutual, similarly, did not make any money from the design. Ball's son, Charles Ball is reported to have said his father never regretted not registering the copyright. Telegram & Gazette reported Charles Ball as saying "he was not a money-driven guy, he used to say, 'Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time'". The World Smile Corporation was founded by Harvey Ball in 1999.
The corporation licenses Smileys and organizes World Smile Day. World Smile Day raises money for the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation, a non-profit charitable trust which supports children's causes. World Smile Day is held on the first Friday of October each year and is a day dedicated to "good cheer and good works". The catch phrase for the day is "Do an act of kindness - help one person smile". Harvey Ball died on April 12, 2001, aged 79, as a result of liver failure following a short illness. He was survived by his wife, Winifred, three sons and a daughter. He has a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
(from  Wikipedia the free encyclopedia)

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