Can you still even get oil paint?

agreed, this logo has bothered me for years.

David,
I have that logo on a backpocket on a pair of painter's shorts that I possess. Yeah, indeed it is a an unfortunate coincidence now with the Gulf oil gush.

It looks like the logo for a league of super villains.

not only is it great, i wear a shirt often that displays it across my entire back. it's a kitschy designer/graffiti thing.

laugh a little.

It's the best logo there is - you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of iconic companies that would allow, much less create, a logo that pokes major fun at its business. It's nice that everyone and their grandma believes they're having an epiphanic environmental awakening, but don't let's sacrifice the funny for it.

6 & 7: Here's something I don't ask often: How is this funny/witty? I don't mean I don't get the joke, I mean I don't SEE the joke, which apparently involves "poking major fun at its business"?

I'm with Josh - this damn thing has bugged me for a very long time. Every time they show a commercial for SW, I get pissed all over again.

David, let me give you one of my seditives.

10: You spelled sedatives wrong, but that doesn't mean I won't accept.

When I was a kid, I thought the Sherwin-Williams logo showed a turtle with an open can of paint on its head. The earth was its shell, the stream of paint was its neck, etc. I thought it was a bad way to sell paint.

@6 as a writer, i'd hardly say it's a graffiti thing.

i'd rather have my BNSF hat back any day.

This is funny primarily because it references the Socialist Workers Party, playing on McCarthy era fears of "red" spread. Red paint, red politics....

@13 as a writer, it is to me.

@ schmader: when humor is explained, it ceases to be humorous. i don't believe the logo pokes fun at it's business, but rather it displays a sort of tongue-in-cheek garishness. imo.

Corresponding T-shirt with proceeds going to Gulf relief:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/46989813/hel…

@15 fair enough.

I've always been fascinated by what an incredibly bad logo that is.

It was a design doodled by an in-house wag in 1895, making fun of the Industrial Revolution's new global reach, using the tension between an ambitious new company and the absurd logical extreme if it were to succeed all too well.

That a company could go through a hundred-year crucible of widening their distribution only to learn their products were toxic, then survive by figuring out how to make them safe... and still keep their logo toying with the idea of a too-painted world - that shows a will to self-satire I could never match myself.

It's funny only in a dark way, granted, but people used to allow that here and there, through times when we had perhaps more reason even than now to be convinced the world was on the brink of immediate destruction.

(I don't think I could be any worse at describing why something's funny, certainly not to someone famous for being great at just that.)

Very few older corporations still use the logos created decades ago when the company formed. I find it rather charming that they have not modernized/depersonaized or otherwise updated. It's not that I think it a really great log, i just like it's actual, as opposed to contrived, retroness.

The dutch boy of Dutch Boy paints has been changed 7 times. http://dutchboy.com/about/

As soon as you mentioned Dutch Boy paints, I thought of Betty Crocker.

http://theewafe.files.wordpress.com/2010…

its the same as a Democratic National Convention logo upside down.