Ravensburger to launch first Smiley jigsaw puzzles

Ravensburger’s Smileyworld Puzzleball™ is made up of 60 curved, sturdy plastic pieces that fit together to form a perfectly round ball. The pieces are connected by following the numbers that appear on the underside of each piece, resulting in a novel and decorative object that brings the famous Smileyworld mood icons into three dimensions.

Ravensburger has also produced a more traditional, but no less challenging, puzzle in the form of a 1000 piece jigsaw. When fully assembled the jigsaw reveals a crowd of Smileys in various states of euphoria. Both puzzles were launched at the end of 2007 and have been exhibited at 2008’s international toy fairs.

The Ravensburger puzzles add to a growing collection of products launched under the Smileyworld brand, which include clothing, stationery, gifts and greeting cards, all featuring Smileyworld icons and designed to help people, particularly children, communicate with each other and learn about emotions in a fun way. There are 1200 Smileyworld icons, representing 250 different moods. These are organised into 18 categories and, among these, the most important are eight subcategories (containing 360 Smileyworld icons), one for each of the eight primary human moods. They work as opposites, such as fear and thinking, anger and love, or happy and sad, and Smileyworld has carefully researched them from Aristotle's original mood classifications. Smileyworld's objective is to help consumers express themselves better, as Nicolas Loufrani, CEO of Smiley Licensing explains, 'Products, featuring the Smileyworld icons, help people to express themselves and can help children to learn about human emotions. The new Ravensburger 3D puzzle, is a good example; it comes on a stand and you can use it to display your mood of the day on your desk.'