Salesforce Asked to Dim Logo on Chicago Office Building

• Salesforce dimmed the brightness of a logo on its new Chicago office building at the request of an alderman.
• The logo was put up earlier this month, but residents complained that it was too bright.
• Salesforce is scheduled to move into the 500,000-square-foot office space in Chicago this year.

The tech industry’s bright lights are getting dimmer — literally. 

In early January, Salesforce — which is set to move into a nearly 60-story office space in Chicago later this year— crowned its Midwest headquarters with a bright fluorescent logo. 

The luminescence seemed welcome at first, with the city’s deputy mayor Samir Mayekar tweeting about the logo’s installation on January 11.

Within days however, Windy City residents began complaining that the lights were too bright, according to tweets compiled in a story by the online newspaper Block Club Chicago, which first reported the news. 

“Now how do we get the brightness turned down? This is an eyesore and public nuisance,” a Twitter user named Dusty Sheldon tweeted in response to Mayekar’s tweet on January 14. 

Another user named gabriel x. michael tweeted that the logo was “ostentatious” and “possibly bad looking.” 

—Dusty Sheldon (@DustySheldon) January 15, 2023

According to Block Club Chicago’s report, Brendan Reilly, alderman of Chicago’s 42nd Ward, asked Salesforce to tone down the brightness. The adjustment took effect on Wednesday, with Salesforce also consenting to turning off the lights at 11pm every night, Reilly’s office told Block Club Chicago. 

A Salesforce spokesperson also told Block Club Chicago that between 5 am and 5 pm the logo’s brightness has been turned down by 70%, between 5 pm and 11 pm the brightness has been reduced 25%, and the logo will be completely shut off between 11 pm – 5 am every day. 

Salesforce has been planning a major move into Chicago for the past several years. In 2018, the company signed a lease on a 500,000 square foot space part of a building complex called Wolf Point, that sits at the bifurcation of the Chicago River. 

Construction was set to commence in 2020, according to Curbed. The official move-in is scheduled for this year according to real estate information company CoStar. The Chicago City Council approved the logo in April 2022.  

Salesforce did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for a comment.