La storia dello smiley

Le origini della faccina sorridente divenuta immediatamente un'icona e le controversie sulla sua paternità raccontate dallo Smithsonian.

In the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film, Forrest Gump stumbles into the history books as he runs across the country.

At one point, he meets a poor T-shirt salesman who, Gump recalls, "wanted to put my face on a T-shirt but he couldn't draw that well and he didn’t have a camera." As luck would have it, a truck drives by and splashes Gump's face with mud. He wipes his face on a yellow T-shirt and hands it back to the down-on-his-luck entrepreneur, telling him to "have a nice day." The imprint of Gump's face left a perfect, abstract smiling face on the bright yellow t-shirt. And thus, an icon was born.

As you probably expect, that was not how the iconic smiley face was created. There was no cross-country runner or struggling t-shirt salesman, there was no truck or mud puddle. There was, however, a graphic designer, some devious salesmen, and an ambitious newspaper man – all add up to a surprisingly complex history for such a simple graphic.