Every time I see the Sherwin-Williams logo, my brain briefly and hopelessly breaks.
And like any good intoxicant, I enjoy it. Because it is, hands-down, one of the worst logos in all of existence—but also one of the all-time greats.
For the uninitiated—and there’s no delicate way to put this—the Sherwin-Williams logo features a moon-size bucket seemingly drowning the Earth with a quadrillion gallons of *blood-red* paint, wholly saturating it to the point where its runoff is in nation-size droplets.
But any attempt to describe it fails to do it justice. It must be experienced.
In the year 2024, this is the Sherwin-Williams logo:
It’s shocking. It’s kind of terrifying. But ultimately, it’s perfect.
I have seen many small companies with confounding logos—but Sherwin-Williams is a category leader that recently reported third-quarter consolidated net sales of $6.16 billion. It’s in a category entirely of its own when it comes to modern branding. Major companies just don’t have logos like this anymore—and, hell, even cofounder Henry A. Sherwin was daunted by its sheer audacity when he first saw it at the turn of the 20th century.
Sherwin and his cofounder, Edwin Williams, created the company in the latter half of the 1800s, and they revolutionized the industry in 1875 by launching the first reliable ready-made paint that didn’t need to be mixed by hand. Back then, the company’s logo was very of its time (which is to say, odd if not archaic): a shield featuring a lizard on a painter’s palette, inspired by color-changing chameleons and . . . designed by Sherwin himself.
In 1890, however, the company launched a publicity department—and Sherwin hired a man named George Ford to run it. Though he likely donned the same........