Figure from:I Heart Design

Figure 15 I think that graphic design itself is a language—a language everybody speaks fluently but doesn’t know they speak it at all. We all know what red means, what a circle means, what a ratty line or a smooth curve means, and we know what a happy face means. Through all of its scattered lives and constant “rebranding,” its basic underlying meaning remains intact. So, who was the author? We’ll never know, like we’ll never really know who did the Coke bottle or the Oreo cookie. It’s lost to a time when we didn’t value authorship in graphic design; indeed, did not value graphic design. So who actually did the first one? Some high school cheerleader? The Dadaists? The Roman Empire? The earliest advertising use of the happy face that I’ve found is the logo for a small (but popular) store in Beulah, Michigan (cherry capital of the world), called The Cherry Hut. Founded in 1922, it uses not the clas- sic yellow Mr. Smiley of 1960. However, I doubt the happy face was invented by The Cherry Hut.

Related Figures (135)

Anyone who knows me is double-
checking the author slug on this piece (a
typo perhaps?), because Stephen Doyle
is definitely not a car guy. It’s true, but get
this: The book is interspersed with vel-
lum sheets, printed in red and black with
things like heavily bordered title pages to
fourteenth-century title pages of treatises
on geometry, in blackletter Latin, which
hits both my graphic design G-spot as
well as the Jesuit-education one. Another
vellum sheet overlays a drawing of a
horseshoe crab on an Arabian diagram
Did I tell you about page 13? A black-
and-white page of text, headlined with
an awful (okay, retro and fun) font, but
wait—someone has pressed a pansy blos-
som in this old magazine. And you reach
for it, to lift it. Bingo! It’s printed! — Anyone who knows me is double- checking the author slug on this piece (a typo perhaps?), because Stephen Doyle is definitely not a car guy. It’s true, but get this: The book is interspersed with vel- lum sheets, printed in red and black with things like heavily bordered title pages to fourteenth-century title pages of treatises on geometry, in blackletter Latin, which hits both my graphic design G-spot as well as the Jesuit-education one. Another vellum sheet overlays a drawing of a horseshoe crab on an Arabian diagram Did I tell you about page 13? A black- and-white page of text, headlined with an awful (okay, retro and fun) font, but wait—someone has pressed a pansy blos- som in this old magazine. And you reach for it, to lift it. Bingo! It’s printed!

As much as it is a beacon, especially for designers such as myself who came of age in the twenty-first century, it is also, in its own way, a barrier. The CBS eye was created just when modernism was entering the mainstream of corporate design culture. Like my partner Tom Geismar’s logo design for Chase Bank a few years later, the CBS eye was one of the very first. But there are, by definition, a finite number of simple forms. In the decades since 1951, modernism swept graphic design, resulting in countless mod- ernist-inspired marks and a crowded visual field. Simplicity has always been hard enough to achieve, but today originality is perhaps even harder. Sagi Haviv is a partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar. Among his projects for the firm are the logo designs and identity systems for the Library of Congress, National Parks of New York Harbor, Radio Free Europe, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the fashion brand Armani Exchange. Haviv designed the award-winning animation Logomotion, a ten-minute tribute to the firm’s famous trademarks. Haviv’s other motion graphics work includes the opening sequence for the celebrated PBS documentary series Carrier.