Painted Wall Signs

The first painted wall sign for The Coca-Cola Company was done in 1894 in Cartersville, GA.  The concept quickly took off and the Company began to commission professional wall sign painters around the country.  According to an excellent 1988 article in the Coca-Cola Collectors News by Bill Bateman and Randy Schaeffer, by 1910 25 % of the entire advertising budget for Coca-Cola was devoted to wall signs.

In addition to the signs commissioned by the Company, our bottlers wanted to utilize this advertising medium.  In order to ensure the standard use of the script logo and colors, the Company began to issue both standards manuals and pounce patterns the bottlers could use for the signs.  While the standards books gave basic instructions on paint colors and how to paint the signs, the pounce patterns were essentially connect the dot paper patterns which could be applied to the wall to give the sign painter lines to paint in.

The photos below are all from a standards books from the 20s, I love the "Right and Wrong Way" page.  Also, note the paint manufacturer listed.