Ever wonder how smileys were invented? Well, ponder no more, the mystery is revealed.

A person by the name of Harvey Ball spent 10 minutes designing the first illustrated smiley faces in 1964 in Worcester, MA. He did this for a client who was attempting to ease that transition of two companies following a merger. But that’s not the beginning.

Previously, the use of character based representation of feeling or emotion has been documented as early as 1857 when Morse coders used the number 73 to represent love and kisses. Since then, in 1881 an American magazine titled ‘Puck’ began printing character based emoticons regularly. The first commonly used emoticon or smiley face was “-)” representing tongue in cheek when someone was being sarcastic.

Scott Falman, a web administrator first used the infamous “:-) and :-(“ in order to show that you were joking or being serious since many misunderstandings were taking place on message boards. Instant messenger programs were initially designed to recognize special character strings and replace them with a smiley face or emoticon. After a while, when smiley faces and emoticons became too numerous and character string became too complex, a little menu was provided in the conversation window to visually select the appropriate smiley face.

The best part of the Smiley Toolbar is that it provides you with a visual menu of more than 10,000 Smiley Faces and emoticons categorized into various groups, and you can use them anywhere in IM programs, social networking sites like facebook and myspace, and even your email. We ensure that the download is 100% Spyware and Adware free so all you have to worry about is how you’re going to use all that Smiley Face Clip Art.