The Logos Of Major Companies Redrawn From The Memories Of 156 People, Visualized

​As citizens of a capitalist society, we're surrounded by corporate logos, and most of us can easily recognize the logos of big consumer-facing companies. But there's a big difference between recognizing a corporate logo and generating it from memory. Custom sign company Signs.com asked 156 Americans to draw a bunch of famous logos from memory, and we have to say they did a lot better on average than we think we'd be able to do. 

Some of the logos were relatively easy, like Apple's apple, which has barely changed in 40 years. Some people put the bite on the wrong side of the fruit or incorrectly added a stem, but most people got pretty close to the real deal.

Then you get into the more convoluted logos, like Starbucks' mermaid — but again, a lot of people did pretty well. (We'd like to offer a shout-out to the one person who drew a coffee cup with two steam lines coming out of it, though. We don't want to know if it was a moment of genuine confusion or a deliberate troll.)

We were especially impressed by how many people got the Walmart logo more or less right. We're pretty sure we would have forgotten all about the starburst.

Here's how accurate everyone was with remembering what the logos looked like.

Signs.com also asked people to draw logos for Adidas, Burger King, Domino's, Foot Locker, Ikea, Target and 7-Eleven. Scroll through all the drawings for each brand, from worst to best, below.

Or you can check out Signs.com's full report, which includes professional renderings of some of the worst drawings from the studies, an interactive logo recall quiz and extended notes on the trickiest parts of these logos. It's a fascinating case study of visual memory and how corporations manage to worm their way into our brains whether we like it or not.

[Signs.com via Tom Scocca]