150 People Attempt to Draw World’s Famous Logos Completely From Memory

Famous Company Logos

Can you remember what the IKEA logo looks like? Could you draw the Starbucks mermaid without peeking? That’s the challenge that Signs.com gave to 156 Americans. In half an hour’s time, they were asked to recreate 10 famous company logos completely from memory. The results, called Branded in Memory, are fascinating; they demonstrate the wide range in which people recall some of the world’s most popular brands.

After all of the logos were drawn, Signs.com arranged them in a chart that shows an array from the least to most accurate recreations. The iterations that were the farthest from the actual thing over simplified the branding or added things that weren’t there in the first place. Many people, for instance, included a stalk on the Apple logo—but it doesn’t have one. Others added too many rings to the bullseye of the Target icon, or forgot to include their name with it. Target, however, fared much better Foot Locker or Domino’s Pizza, who had less than half their logos drawn correctly.

Of all the challenges with this exercise, there’s one aspect of branding that was consistently done correctly: color. Not matter how askew the image itself was, 80% of participants selected the right hues for these logos. It shows that this characteristic shouldn’t be underestimated—often, it’s the most memorable part of the identity.