Did You Know? Salvador Dalí Designed the Chupa Chups Logo.

One of Salvador Dalí's most famous pieces of work isn't hanging in a gallery. You won't queue to see it, and it won't cost millions at auction. In fact, you can pick it up at almost any corner shop for pocket change, and there's a good chance you've held one in your hand.

It's the Chupa Chups logo. That bright red wordmark, nestled inside a yellow daisy, sitting on top of a billion lollipops. And it was designed by one of the most celebrated surrealist artists who ever lived.

Chupa Chups was founded in 1958 by Spanish entrepreneur Enric Bernat, who'd hit on a brilliantly simple idea: put the sweet on a stick, so children could eat it without covering their hands, and their parents, in stickiness. The name came from the Spanish verb chupar, meaning "to suck".

The lollipops sold well, but by the late 1960s Bernat wasn't happy with the branding. The existing logo, all black and red, just wasn't distinctive enough to leap out from a crowded sweet display.

Bernat happened to be friends with a fellow Catalan who knew a thing or two about creating unforgettable images: Salvador Dalí. In 1969, over coffee, Bernat aired his frustration. And as the story goes, Dalí grabbed a nearby sheet of newspaper and doodled out a new design in under an hour, right there at the table.

What Dalí produced was deceptively simple. He kept the brand's existing script but rendered it in bold red, then set the whole thing inside a bright yellow flower, a daisy shape whose petals frame the name and burst with cheerful, childlike energy. It's playful, warm and impossible to miss.

For an artist famous for melting clocks and dreamlike, unsettling landscapes, it's striking how joyful and clean the Chupa Chups mark is. Dalí understood the audience wasn't a gallery crowd. It was children reaching for a treat, and he designed accordingly.

Dalí didn't just draw the logo. He told Bernat where to put it. Instead of placing the mark on the side of the wrapper, as was normal for sweets at the time, he insisted it should sit on the very top of the lollipop.

Think about why that's so clever. A lollipop doesn't sit still on a shelf like a chocolate bar. It gets jammed into jars and display stands, tumbled into bowls, grabbed and turned and held at every angle. Put the logo on the side and half the time you can't see it. Put it on top, facing up, and it's always visible, always the right way round, always intact no matter how the lollies are bunched together.

That's not art. That's branding strategy of the highest order, and it's the reason the logo became one of the most recognisable pieces of packaging design on earth. Dalí wasn't only thinking about how the mark looked. He was thinking about how it would live in the real world, in shops, in hands, in bowls on a thousand shop counters. Any packaging designer will tell you that's the whole game.

If the idea of a fine artist designing sweet wrappers surprises you, it shouldn't. Dalí was famously entrepreneurial, so much so that his fellow surrealists coined the mocking anagram "Avida Dollars" for him, roughly "eager for dollars". He lent his talents to advertising throughout his career, working on campaigns for chocolate, Alka-Seltzer and fashion houses. For Dalí, commerce and art were never enemies. The Chupa Chups logo is simply his most enduring, and most licked, commercial work.

The logo has barely changed in over 50 years. A small refresh in 1990 added a few coloured accents, but Dalí's core idea, the red name in the yellow daisy, on top of the lolly, remains completely intact. Chupa Chups now sells in more than 150 countries.

This is one of our favourite Did You Know? stories because it collapses the imaginary wall between "art" and "design". A surrealist master sat down and solved a real commercial problem with wit, clarity and a genuinely strategic idea about visibility. No ego, no fuss, just a great mark and a smart decision about where it should live.

This is part of our Did You Know? series, where we explore the stories behind the world's most iconic design. Follow along on Instagram for more.