Typographic illustration. What is the oldest known instance of this? I’ll tell you one of the first, if not the first instance of the face, aka the emoticon. It’s in a 1881 issue, (No212, page 64,) of the magazine Puck. It’s what you see above, a call out to the artists of the world by the type setters of that magazine. Some faces! Made of typographic symbols! Can you believe it!? Technically the original one might have been in a written speech for President Lincoln, which you can find out more about this at the New York Times blog by Jennifer 8 Lee. An image of the original speech is also included in this post in the gallery below.

The Lincoln speech was written sometime around 1862. That one is something like a “;)”, and there are some big doubts about weather or not it was a typo, some sort of incorrectly used mark, or a sort of “wink” symbol. So that would be the first one, but for certain the next one is the 1881 set of faces you see above. Supposedly the next time a smily can be tracked is a 1982 as typed by IBM researcher Scott Fahlman in some sort of online message to an associate. Did he know how epic his simple gesture would be to the sideways world?

Below in the gallery, you’ll see both the items noted here, plus more amazing typography from Puck magazine.

But hey, lemme tell you something. Somone used a smily before 1881. The article snip you see above is the first time this group of folks published their works. They’d done it before though, but did they ever make a note about it? Keep your eyes open.

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies typography category.