Salvador Dali, Logo Designer?

Look at the work of this man — the melting clocks, the burning giraffes, the grasshoppers clinging to distorted faces — and “corporate logo designer” is not the first job title that comes to mind. But it’s a real line on Salvador Dalí‘s resume, and one of the strangest, most successful pieces of branding of the 20th century came out of it.

Salvador Dalí, the Catalan surrealist painter best known for his pointed mustache and his liquefying timepieces, spent an afternoon in 1969 doing something wonderfully out of character: designing the logo and wrapper for a lollipop.

The lollipop in question, Chupa Chups, dates back to 1958, when the Catalan confectioner Enric Bernat had the idea of putting a caramel on a stick so children could eat candy without sticky fingers. His first name for the product, GOL — Spanish for “goal,” with the candy as the ball and an open mouth as the net — didn’t stick. An ad agency renamed it Chupa Chups, borrowing from the Spanish verb chupar, “to suck,” and the brand grew steadily through the 1960s without ever quite nailing its visual identity. By the end of the decade, Bernat wanted something better — and, as the story goes, he happened to be friends with one of Spain’s most famous living artists.

According to the well-documented account, Dalí sat down with Bernat over coffee, heard the problem, and reportedly sketched the new mark on a spread newspaper in under an hour — a bright, daisy-shaped flower with the Chupa Chups wordmark woven directly through its petals, rendered in his own confident hand rather than handed off to an agency. It’s a small, tidy piece of graphic design from a man whose day job was dismantling the rules of representation entirely, and it has barely changed since (the logo was refined slightly in 1988, but the daisy and the integrated type are still unmistakably Dalí’s).

Phaidon points out the one detail that turns a nice sketch into genuinely smart design: Dalí’s insistence on where the logo actually sat on the candy.

Acutely aware of presentation, Dalí insisted that his design be placed on top of the lolly, rather than the side, so that it could always be viewed intact. It’s proved to be one of the most enduring pieces of branding ever and one that’s still used today, four billion sales later.

That’s the whole trick of great branding, distilled into one candy: make sure the mark is always facing the customer, no matter how the object gets handled. It’s a lesson plenty of trained graphic designers never quite learn, and Dalí apparently absorbed it instantly, between sips of coffee.

So what convinced one of art history’s great provocateurs to take on a candy commission? By most accounts, simply money — Dalí rarely turned down a paying job, gallery show, or licensing deal, a habit that earned him the nickname “Avida Dollars” from his former Surrealist ally, the poet André Breton. It’s an anagram of Dalí’s name that roughly translates to “eager for dollars,” and Breton meant it as an insult. Fifty-plus years and four billion lollipops later, it’s hard to argue Dalí didn’t get the better end of that particular joke.