Since 1997, the Smiley Company has transformed a simple logo into a rich visual language. While the original Smiley remains our iconic foundation, we’ve continued to evolve, creating new styles to reflect shifting trends, technologies, and ways of expressing emotion. Today, Smileys are more than just faces – they’re a visual language, and an enduring reflection of joy, creativity, and human expression.
Below, you will see the evolution of the Smileys and their different design styles that have been created throughout the last 30 years. However, if you are looking for a longer history into the birth of emojis and the first universal language, that redefined emotional expression, please read: The Smiley Blueprint: How 1990s Design Shaped the Birth of Emojis, the First Universal Language.
In 1997, a pivotal moment in digital design intersected with personal legacy. With the growing capabilities of computers and graphics software, a new visual language became possible – one that broke free from the flat constraints of early digital art. This was the year the first 90s 3D Smiley was born.
Inspired by his father’s two-dimensional logo, Nicolas Loufrani reimagined the classic Smiley logo using the burgeoning tools of the era. For the first time, the cheerful icon was not confined to lines and flat color blocks – it had volume, light, and presence. Gone was the black outline. In its place: a sphere radiating with orangey gradients and white highlights, floating on a soft shadow.
Loufrani studied human emotions by mimicking expressions in the mirror, developing an expansive emotional language of Smileys. He also introduced entire icon categories – flags, occupations, sports, celebrations, objects, animals, nature, weather, transport – to turn icons into a joyful alternative to words.
As the new millennium started, the evolution of Smileys took a reflective turn. The TECH style emerged from Loufrani’s desire to reconnect with the visual roots of the 1970s and the line art style of his favourite Franco-Belgian comic books also named Ligne Claire, for clear lines.
TECH brought back the bold black outline and flat, solid colours, evoking the graphic clarity of the original Smiley. Yet, it retained the expressive depth and iconographic variety developed in the 1990s.
TECH wasn’t just retro – it was a harmonization of heritage and modernity, a style that honored the past while remaining visually relevant for digital communication.
Under TECH the categories expanded to include music instruments, actions using hands (white gloves), celebrities/parodies, planets, zodiac, and symbols.
Loufrani developed Toony, a style inspired by old-school American cartoons.
Toony introduced irregular, hand-drawn outlines, as if sketched with a fountain pen with a large flexible nib. It kept the light and shadow elements from 90s 3D, but translated them into flat colour shapes – giving the illusion of depth while remaining two-dimensional.
Toony injected a humorous and playful spirit into the smiley universe, encouraging fun characters, actions, and emotional exaggeration. It was bold, expressive, and animated.
With the design world shifting toward minimalism, Flat Toony was created as a modernized version of Toony.
It preserved the hand-drawn charm and quirky outlines, but removed the lighting effects, simplifying the smiley into a pure flat style. The yellow hue was brightened to match TECH, making the icons feel cleaner and more screen-friendly.
Flat Toony was ideal for apps and digital platforms, combining personality with clarity. It brought back modernity while keeping a slight handmade feel.
As Unicode Apple-style icons exploded globally, Loufrani revisited 3D with modern tools to create Glossy.
Glossy used advanced rendering and lighting, giving smileys a realistic, almost photo-like look. With bright yellow tones and reflective surfaces, these smileys looked like virtual sculptures – sleek, dimensional, and designed for the high-res digital world.
Glossy was a return to form, but evolved with modern sophistication.
In contrast to Glossy’s precision, Loufrani took a bold, artistic turn with Sketchy. This style looked like a pencil sketch, with multiple overlapping outlines and imperfect colouring – like something drawn by a child.
Sketchy was intentionally raw, handmade, and expressive. It gave the smiley a creative, arty feel, standing out in a world of digital perfection. More than a style, Sketchy was a statement of individuality.
The latest leap came with AI3D, born in 2023 through cutting-edge 3D and AI technologies. These smileys don’t just look dimensional – they appear to be photographs of real metal or resin objects.
Using AI-assisted modeling, physically based rendering (PBR), and cinematic lighting, AI3D icons achieve hyper-realism. They shine, reflect, and curve like physical sculptures.
AI3D is edgy, modern, and stunningly detailed – a smiley not just designed, but virtually sculpted for the future.
In the 2020s, Nicolas Loufrani introduced a radical departure from all previous smiley aesthetics with the launch of the NU Style. Until then, every style – no matter how modern, playful, or artistic – had remained faithful to the original facial proportions designed by his father. The defining feature of that original mouth was an incomplete half-circle, with asymmetrical commissures and a curvature varying in thickness from centre to edge.
NU Style changed all of that.
For the first time in the Smileys’ visual history, the mouth was redrawn as a perfect, symmetrical half-circle. Both sides were identical and flat, creating a visual structure that felt more mechanical and deliberate than organic or expressive. The mouth commussures were no longer varied in weight – they matched the thickness of the new, bolder outer outline, creating a sense of precision and uniformity.
The eyes were enlarged, giving the face an entirely new energy. Combined with the thick, uniform outlines, NU Style introduced a bold, minimalistic, and geometrically pure identity that felt unlike any previous smiley style. It broke away from anthropomorphic representation and entered a visual space that felt more aligned with Op Art – a world of abstraction, contrast, and optical clarity.
This style marked a conceptual evolution as much as a visual one. NU Style is not about emotional mimicry – it’s about design purity. It is architectural, modern, and strikingly distinct, setting a NU edge for what a smiley can be in the visual culture of the 2020s.
In the 2020s, the London based Smiley studio introduced another stylistic leap with the Pixel Style – a design that acts as a bridge between the 1970s and the 1990s, as if Smiley had evolved into Smileys through the pixelated lens of the 1980s digital revolution.
Developed with the work of Suzanne Kerr in mind, this style revisits the smiley universe through the aesthetic of early video game consoles or the first Macintosh interfaces. Each NU icon is crafted on a 24×24 pixel grid, evoking the charming limitations of early pixel art while delivering a distinct retro-futuristic identity.
The Pixel Style imagines an alternate design history: what if the Smileys had been created for arcade screens, monochrome monitors, or primitive GUIs? These pixelated expressions give us a glimpse into that parallel past—one filled with low-resolution magic.
Although they are an artistic anachronism, these Smileys tap into a rich seam of digital nostalgia. They feel authentic to the 80s era while simultaneously celebrating the simplicity and creativity of modern retro design. The result is a collection that is visually distinct, culturally resonant, and perfectly timed for a generation embracing pixel art as both memory and medium.
Beyond flat icons and graphic styles, the Smiley universe has also come to life through a series of animated and plush characters. This dimension of the brand began in 1988, when a Smiley with arms, legs was first created for a plush doll. The original design featured black limbs, white gloves, and black-and-white sneakers – a playful and instantly lovable figure.
By the late 1990s, these characters evolved further with yellow limbs that better matched the Smiley icon. The limbs came in various lengths and designs, allowing for greater flexibility and personality in how they moved and expressed themselves.
A full character body plush was also developed called the Smiley baby. It evolved into Mini Smiley, characters later appearing in a cartoon, featuring baby-like proportions, rosy cheeks, and iconic facial traits representing animals, toddlers, and youthful personalities.
These characters are not just visual add-ons – they are living embodiments of the Smiley spirit: joyful, dynamic, elastic, and ready to explore.
In the 2020s, Nicolas Loufrani launched a bold new chapter in visual expression with NewMoji Hyper-Realistic Art. Inspired by the movement of hyper-realistic sculpture and painting, art forms celebrated for their uncanny photographic detail, this style takes on an ambitious mission: to transform everyday icons into genuine works of art.
Unlike the original Smileys, which consistently uses the smiley eyes, mouth, and round face as the foundation for every icon, be it an emotion, a flag, a sport, or a celebration, the Unicode library consists mostly of literal depictions of reality: animals, objects, gestures, people, clothing, and activities. However, the Unicode library and their default visual style, especially across platforms, often feels generic or cartoonish. Loufrani saw an opportunity: what if these icons were rendered as if painted by a master artist?
The result is NewMoji Hyper-Realistic Art: a style that elevates icons into gallery-worthy images, rendered with such precision that they appear to be hand-painted or hand-drawn at photographic quality. Every texture, shadow, and surface is crafted to replicate the richness of traditional craftsmanship, bringing warmth, soul, and artistic credibility to symbols that were once flat and forgettable.
The style draws inspiration from the work of world-renowned hyperrealist artists such as Ron Mueck, known for his lifelike sculptures of human figures, and Chuck Close, whose portraits blur the line between photography and painting. Their influence underscores the ambition behind NewMoji: to push digital symbols to the limits of visual realism, while still keeping them expressive and functional.
It’s also important to note that these icons do not feature smiley-like faces, a conscious decision that separates them conceptually and visually from the core smiley universe. For this reason, Loufrani introduced them under a new brand: NewMoji, designed to stand independently as a premium visual language rooted in artistic realism rather than emotional expression.
NewMoji Hyper-Realistic Art redefines what a digital icon can be. No longer disposable or flat, these NewMojis offer a deeply human visual experience, bridging the worlds of technology and fine art.
In the 2020s, Nicolas Loufrani extended the NewMoji brand into a bold, cinematic direction with the launch of NewMoji Extreme 3D. Inspired by the rich visual worlds created by major animation studios, this style brings a new level of storytelling, personality, and visual impact to iconography.
The goal was clear: to create a system of icons that felt as alive, colourful, and dynamic as the characters on the big screen. These designs are infused with the visual language of modern animation, high contrast lighting, vibrant colour palettes, expressive textures, and emotive anatomy, producing characters that seem ready to leap off the screen.
For the emotions category, the classic smiley was reimagined. Gone are the black oval eyes and stylized arc mouth. Instead, these characters feature realistic human-like eyes, sculpted mouths, and more nuanced facial features, bringing them closer in look and feel to animated film characters than to traditional emoticons. They are emotional beings, not just icons.
For all other categories, like animals, people, objects, nature, and more, Loufrani and his team left the smiley form behind entirely. Because this style falls under the NewMoji brand, it no longer follows the smiley system, (which consistently uses the round face, smiley eyes, and smiley mouth as its base for every concept). Instead, it embraces the same real-world categories seen in Unicode icons, but completely reinterprets them in a fantasy, theatrical, and cartoon-like universe.
NewMoji Extreme 3D creates an iconography that is not just modern, but cinematic. It’s a style built to delight, perform, and express, combining the narrative power of animation with the clarity of symbolic communication.
From 90s 3D to AI3D, the Smileys have continuously evolved under the vision of Nicolas Loufrani who finally created a new brand called NewMoji to refresh Unicode icons. Each style – TECH, Toony, Flat Toony, Glossy, Sketchy, AI3D, Characters but also hyper realistic art and extreme 3D – represents not just a new look, but a new emotional vocabulary for a changing world.
Smileys are more than a face. They are a visual language, a design legacy, and an enduring reflection of joy, creativity, and human expression.
In 2027, The Smiley Company will be celebrating 30 Years of Smileys, an anniversary celebrating the digital revolution and it’s part in showcasing emotional expression around the world.
With opportunities to use all of the many Smileys’ styles and create your own collector editions with more than 100 style guides and category decks based on the latest design trends, get in touch to work with us on this special milestone.
