What is Awesome Face Epic Smiley?

A yellow smiley with a huge open-mouthed grin that started as a SomethingAwful forum emoticon and moved to 4chan as oversized wallpaper material.

Where did Awesome Face Epic Smiley come from?

SomethingAwful user Whalley added it as a paid emoticon to SA's smiley roster in late January 2007.

What does Awesome Face Epic Smiley mean?

It signals over-the-top enthusiasm or ironic hype, originally coded as :awesome: on SA before being recoded as :fuckyou: after overuse.

How do you use Awesome Face Epic Smiley?

People typically post it as a reaction emoticon or blow it up into a giant pixelated desktop wallpaper.

Is Awesome Face Epic Smiley still popular?

It's a classic 2000s forum emoticon best known for its 2007 SomethingAwful takeoff and later 4chan wallpaper run.

Awesome Face Epic Smiley

2007emoticonclassic

Published August 15, 2026

Awesome Face Epic Smiley is a yellow cartoon grin that began as a paid SomethingAwful forum emoticon in January 2007 before jumping to 4chan, where users blew it up into giant pixelated desktop wallpapers.

something awful memes emoticon memes 4chan memes late 2000s memes forum era memes

Overview

Awesome Face Epic Smiley is a yellow cartoon face with a wide open-mouthed grin and small dot eyes, often shown scaled up to fill an entire screen as a pixelated desktop background1. It first circulated as a paid emoticon on the SomethingAwful forums under the code :awesome:, submitted through SA's member-funded smiley system1.

What made the Awesome Face different from a plain smiley was how quickly users pushed it past its emoticon size, turning the giant grin into a visual joke on its own2. The oversized-wallpaper version is what carried the image from forum culture into wider imageboard use.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

SomethingAwful (source), 4chan (viral spread)

Creator

Whalley; original artist disputed

Date

2007

SomethingAwful user Whalley purchased and added the smiley to SA's emoticon roster in late January 2007, using the site's pay-to-add smiley feature1. Blogger Chris Ainsworth, who writes as Driph, tracked the history in a 2008 investigation and ruled out popular misattributions such as a Cyanide and Happiness comic, pointing out the SA smiley thread predated the comic by more than a month1.

How It Spread

The face detonated on SomethingAwful almost immediately. On January 30, 2007, an SA thread titled "NEW EMOTICON HITS SOMETHING AWFUL – BUT HOW POPULAR IS TOO POPULAR?" complained the emoticon and its variants were showing up in nearly every post on the forum2. To try to slow the flood, the same image was later recoded as :fuckyou: and then :iamafag:1.

From SomethingAwful the Awesome Face jumped to 4chan, where the video games board /v/ picked it up with heavy enthusiasm1. On the /wg/ wallpaper board, users started dedicated threads for giant Awesome Face desktop backgrounds3. By August 26, 2011, a Facebook fan page had collected 42,649 likes, a Firefox theme was hosted on Get Personas, and Newgrounds user juegos had uploaded a flash game built around the face3.

How to Use This Meme

People typically drop the Awesome Face into replies as an exaggerated reaction of glee or ironic hype. A common convention is to blow the smiley up to fill an entire image or screen, playing on the original 4chan wallpaper joke where the bigger and more pixelated the render, the funnier it lands3.