The Cellar - THanksgiving

Ever wonder who designed that logo? Owsley Stanley. An interesting man.

Quote:

Along with his close friend Bob Thomas, he designed the Lightning Bolt Skull Logo,[12] often referred to by fans as "Steal Your Face", "Stealie" or SYF (after the name of the 1976 Grateful Dead album featuring only the lightning bolt skull on the cover, although the symbol predates the namesake album by eight years). The 13-point lightning bolt was derived from a stencil Stanley created to spray-paint on the Grateful Dead's equipment boxes (he wanted an easily identifiable mark to help the crew find the Dead's equipment in the jumble of multiple bands' identical black equipment boxes at festivals). The lightning bolt design came to him after seeing a similar design on a roadside advertisement: "One day in the rain, I looked out the side and saw a sign along the freeway which was a circle with a white bar across it. The top of the circle was orange, and the bottom blue. I couldn't read the name of the firm, and so was just looking at the shape. A thought occurred to me: if the orange were red and the bar across were a lightning bolt cutting across at an angle, then we would have a very nice, unique and highly identifiable mark to put on the equipment."[12] Stanley suggested to Thomas that the words "Grateful Dead" might be drawn beneath the red, white and blue circled bolt in such a way that it looked like a skull. Thomas returned with the now familiar Grateful Dead icon, having discarded the hidden-word concept. The lightning-adorned skull logo made its first appearance on the 1973 release, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1: Bear's Choice