The Official Name of the ‘S’ We Grew Up Loving to Draw

It’s the S we all most likely drew at some point growing up:

But what is it called and where did it come from? Well, the first question is relatively simple to answer.

The official name for this S is “Cool S’ and as to where it comes from, that’s a bit more complicated.

A Swedish Redditor recently attempted to answer that very question and ended up going down a rabbit hole trying to trace the origins of the cool S. In the end, he spent 5 years looking for where it came from. The Cool S has appeared in Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Greece, Germany, France, South Africa, Iceland and many more. At one stage it was thought the S was created by the clothing company Stussy in the 90s. However, Stussy themselves have said the symbol predates them. Another possibility is that the S is a simplified version of the Japanese carmaker Suzuki’s logo which was created in 1958. However, it turns out the Cool S is way older than that. After extensive research, the Swedish Redditor traced the first known use of the symbol all the way back to the 1890s in a magazine called Mechanical Graphics by a man named Fredrick Newton Wilson.