Guess the Logo

Brands you can name from one colour

A few are genuinely identifiable from a single flat swatch. Brown is UPS — nobody else in commercial branding wants it. A deep flat blue with white on it is Nivea. A specific mid-green is WhatsApp, and the only other green in the deck is the Bayer cross, which is a word written twice, horizontally and vertically, sharing its Y.

Colour pairs are nearly as good. Yellow on red with a curve in it is McDonald's. Blue with a yellow burst is Walmart. Two interlocking circles in red and orange is Mastercard. Concentric red rings on white is Target. Red with white script is Kit Kat, and red with a white slab-serif capital is 3M or Lego depending on whether there is yellow in the frame.

The ones that resist are the monochrome marks: Apple, Nike, X, Wikipedia's grey globe. A black shape on a light ground gives you outline geometry and nothing else, which is why the backing here is light rather than dark — a great many logos are black on transparent, and on a dark backing those reveal nothing at all.

Letterforms are the fastest read

When a window lands on type, look at the terminals and the weight rather than trying to read a word. A geometric sans with perfectly circular Os is one family of brands; a serif with high contrast between thick and thin strokes is a luxury or heritage mark; a script is a beverage, a cosmetic or a car from before 1970.

Custom letterforms are their own signal. A lowercase letter with an unusual bowl, a ligature between two characters, a letter with a piece cut out of it — these are drawn rather than set, which means a serious brand rather than a small one, and there are only 58 of those here.

The ladder

2 windows, then 5, 9, 14 and 20 out of 24, in a fixed order per round. Nine windows is where a wordmark usually becomes readable and where an abstract mark usually becomes a shape rather than a fragment.

The frame is landscape and the mark is fitted inside it rather than cropped to fill, because logos range from tall roundels to very wide wordmarks and cropping takes the identifying part off both.

Where the images come from

Every mark is the lead image of that company's English Wikipedia article, which is less reliable than it sounds: plenty of company articles lead with a photograph of the headquarters, a shop front, a founder or a product. Nike's opens on its Beaverton campus, Microsoft's on an aerial view of Redmond, Coca-Cola's on a bottle. Every title in the list was checked and kept only where the lead image is actually the mark; where a dedicated article for the mark exists, that is used instead, as with Swoosh for Nike. Everything else was dropped rather than fudged.

The second filter is stricter and is why the deck is 42 brands rather than 58. English Wikipedia hosts a great many logos locally under its own fair-use rationale, and that rationale covers an encyclopedia's use, not an ad-supported game hotlinking the same file. Wikimedia Commons accepts only freely licensed or public-domain media, so the rule here is simple: if the file the loader ends up fetching lives on Commons it stays, and if it lives on English Wikipedia it goes. Sixteen entries failed that test, eleven of them outright non-free and four more public domain in the United States alone. Instagram went for a different reason — its article now leads with a screenshot of the app rather than the mark, which made the round unplayable anyway.

Naming a brand from its mark is nominative use. The marks are shown as published, unaltered apart from the reveal, and no endorsement is implied by any of it.

Scoring

Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380, 240 and 150. Because the answer list is 42 items and searchable, the useful discipline is to type a sector rather than a guess — seeing that the deck holds exactly three airlines, five car marques and five film and television companies is free, and narrowing three candidates to one before submitting is what separates a 7,000 from a 4,000.