George Tanagi's Work Is All Around

Whether you know it or not, George Tanagi's handiwork is all around you.

A smiley face here, a food label there, a familiar business logo.

Mr. Tanagi was a respected commercial artist with a large and well-known body of work when he died of a heart attack Dec. 8 at the age of 75.

Mr. Tanagi's portfolio included logos for the Seattle Sonics, K2 skis, Starbucks' frappucino, Sun Luck foods, Egghead Software and a version of the yellow smiley-face symbol that became ubiquitous in the 1970s.

"He probably did a lot of stuff that people pick up every day and don't even know it," said his daughter, Patricia.

She and Mr. Tanagi's other children remembered him as a man who communicated less with words than with methodical acts that showed deep care and extraordinary patience. "Instead of a regular snowman for the winter, he would create an 8-foot Space Needle," recalled his son, Page.

Mr. Tanagi was known as an easygoing man who so disliked talking about death and other such serious subjects that some family members said they weren't even sure what to include in his funeral service last week. For instance, when they had tried to ask him about his time in a World War II internment camp in Puyallup, he simply answered, "It was cold."

Born in 1924, in Austin, Ore., Mr. Tanagi was the youngest of nine children of Japanese immigrant parents. Five years later, the family farmed vegetables on the spot where University Village now stands. Mr. Tanagi had attended Bryant Elementary and Roosevelt High School until WWII broke out, and he was herded along with other Japanese Americans into an internment camp.

"We thought it was very unfair, because Germans and Italians weren't treated the same way," recalled Mr. Tanagi's brother, Rick, who now lives in Rainier Valley. Despite resentment of the indignity, Rick said that when both he and George were drafted, "We all wanted to prove our loyalty to the United States."

Mr. Tanagi went on to become a staff sergeant in the Army's famous 442nd Infantry Regiment, serving in Italy before he returned to attend art school on the G.I. Bill.

Later, Mr. Tanagi spent many years working for David Stern Advertising. It was there that the smiley face he created for University Federal Savings and Loan later became a bone of contention, which Stern eventually acknowledged his firm had "popularized" but not invented. (Harvey Ball, of Worcester, Mass., reportedly came up with it in 1963.)

When Stern folded his firm to run for mayor of Seattle in 1993, Mr. Tanagi opened his own studio, called GeoART, where he maintained an office at the School of Visual Concepts into his semiretirement.

In his personal life, Mr. Tanagi was said to have read and bowled as avidly as he partied, spending days at Imperial Lanes and singing karaoke after hours at the Bush Garden restaurant.

Mr. Tanagi's joking demeanor, along with what seemed to be a bottomless pocketful of candy, also made him a favorite of children. A bowl of candy was left next to his casket during the memorial service.

Other survivors include his wife, Patsy; son Matthew; granddaughter Mika; sisters Sayo Harmeling and Aya Shimomura.