We do a lot, but we also don’t do that much’: Nicolas Loufrani, CEO of the Smiley Company, photographed in Milan. Photograph: Alberto Bernasconi/The Observer As music genres began to create their own cultures from the 1970s onwards, many cultures began to incorporate a smiling face into their culture. In the late 1970s, the American band Dead Kennedys launched their first recording, " California über alles". The single cover was a collage aimed to look like that of a Nazi rally prior to World War II. It featured three of the vertical banners commonly used at such rallies, but with the usual swastikas replaced by large smileys. [42] In the UK, the happy face has been associated with psychedelic culture since Ubi Dwyer and the Windsor Free Festival in the 1970s and the electronic dance music culture, particularly with acid house, that emerged during the Second Summer of Love in the late 1980s. The association was cemented when the band Bomb the Bass used an extracted smiley from the comic book series Watchmen on the center of its " Beat Dis" hit single.

Loufrani was determined to rebuild the family business. His approach was different to his father’s. Think “global lifestyle brand” as opposed to purveyor of flea market tat. He began trademarking the smiley around the world (a notable exception being the US, where the Smiley Company settled out of court following a 10-year legal battle with Walmart, which uses the logo in its promotions). Loufrani also developed digital iterations of the smiley that could be licensed out, such as graphic emoticons. He tinkered with the design, and tried out new versions with a 3D effect. Franklin wasn’t convinced. “He was shouting at me, saying, ‘Why are you changing my smiley?’ says Loufrani. “I always say: imagine you were the son of Hugh Hefner and he asked you to relaunch Playboy, and you drew Bugs Bunny. It was like that.” It has no negative connotations. It’s up there with religious iconography In the late-1980s, the smiley again became a prominent image within the music industry. It was adopted during the growth of acid house across Europe and the UK in the late 1980s. According to many, this began when DJ, Danny Rampling, used the smiley to celebrate Paul Oakenfold's birthday. [44] This sparked a movement where the smiley moved into various dance genres, becoming a symbol of 1980s dance music. [45] Madrigal, Alexis C. (14 April 2014). "The First Emoticon May Have Appeared in ... 1648". The Atlantic . Retrieved 15 April 2014.By 1972, the Spain brothers had produced an estimated 50 million pin badges and a smiley logo that was slightly more refined than Ball’s hand-drawn original, with even, oval eyes and a smoother, semicircular smile. The image became inextricably associated with the zeitgeist of early-1970s America. Due to the way these codes were implemented, sets of three or more Regional Indicator characters aren't feasible, as text rendering engines will match any two with an emoji first (eg if XSD were used for South Dakota, text engines would render the XS as a Scottish flag first, and be left with the D hanging at the end)

Despite the smiley’s capacity for anarchy and it’s potential to oscillate, as Savage wrote, “between Heaven and Hell”, its universal appeal as an icon of seductively uncomplicated joy remains undiminished. The 🇬🇧 United Kingdom is listed under ISO 3166-1 (the list of countries which a country or region needed to be listed on to get a flag). Now famous for his distortion of widely recognised brands and icons, Banksy started painting riot police and soldiers with smiley faces in 2003, a juxtaposition that, drawing on the sign’s long history, carries a message that is simultaneously comic and profoundly political. If Watchmen helped to establish the smiley as an ironic icon with a contemporary audience, it did so as part of a tradition that recalls the sign's use in Vietnam and by bands such as Talking Heads, who featured a sinister-looking smiley on the Taxi Driver-inspired cover of their 1977 12" single, Psycho Killer.

Custom Printed Smiley Face Flags at The Flag Shop

However ISO has a different list which shows subdivisions for each country. You can view subdivisions for the UK or the USA, or any country in the world. These use the country code, followed by a subdivision. For instance Scotland is GB-SCT and Texas is US-TX. Each code is unique. Gunn, Frank (28 July 2012). "Spectators play with giant smiley face beach balls during the pre-show for the Olympic Games Opening ceremonies in London on Friday July 27, 2012". Vancouver Sun. Archived from the original on 3 October 2020 . Retrieved 9 April 2020. ZWJ Sequences are generally seen as more flexible, but it would be odd to use a color-based sequence if the design for any particular pride flag is likely to change over time. The same would apply to any code point that referenced the design instead of the intention.

Flags intended to represent specific countries or regions of the world must have a valid Unicode region code (based on ISO/BCP47) or Unicode subdivision code (based on ISO 3166-2).” smileys, emoticons, typewriter art". Text Patterns - The New Atlantis. Archived from the original on 28 February 2017 . Retrieved 9 August 2014. For each flag shown on an average emoji keyboard, there are at least four different ways it might be encoded behind the scenes. The fact that some obscure flags have an emoji (looking at you, Isle of Man) isn't necessarily because they met current-day criteria about usage, but could just be that they were on the right list at the right time (namely, most region codes on the ISO 31616-1 list).

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Crews, Isaac (12 March 2022). "David Guetta Joins Smiley's Campaign Of Positivity With An Exclusive Video Release For Upbeat Anthem 'Silver Screen' ". Sounderground. Several terms redirect here. For other uses, see Smiley Face (disambiguation)and Happy face (disambiguation).

This naming convention is used within ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, whereby "X" at the start indicates a sequence not part of the standard, but permits a space where new ISO codes won't be allocated. The European Commission and SWIFT use "XK" as a stand-in for Kosovo. Also supported within Unicode. ↩︎ In May 1972, Mad magazine got in on the act when it published a smiley-themed cover – with Alfred E Neuman's inimitable face contained within a yellow disc. It was over in France in the same year, however, that journalist Franklin Loufrani became the first person to register the icon for commercial use. Chequered Flag is the easiest of the flags. It happens to look like a flag, but isn't encoded any differently to a 📻 Radio or 🎺 Trumpet. For example: Native American tribe flags, Australian Aboriginal flag, Maori flag, Torres-Strait Islander flag. In October of 1971 [1] Loufrani trademarked the name and his design in France while working as a journalist for France Soir. Competing terms were used such as smiling face and happy face before consensus was reached on the term smiley, less often spelled "smilie". [ citation needed]Still, he was surprised to discover that the image still has the power to provoke. When he and Deller were asked by Somerset House to produce a flag to fly above the building for its Utopia 2016 season (to mark 500 years since the publication of Thomas More’s seminal text), they inevitably landed on the image. At first, Somerset House was uneasy. “They were initially concerned due to the smiley faces’ association with acid house, rave music and recreational drugs,” he says. “But once the flag was up and people started taking pictures of it and seeing it as a positive symbol, it stayed up for two years.” Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use