Drawing Logos from Memory

Over the last six months or so I’ve designed some logos for a few new clients. During the sketching process that I always go through while designing a logo I happened to come across a neat little article on Adweek about remembering certain brands’ logos and how well you could re-draw them from memory. Just for fun I tried a few. 

Most of the logos I tried are very recognizable, but even as someone who is pretty adept at noticing details, remembering the little bits that make the logos what they are was quite challenging. For example, I see the Apple logo every single day so that one was pretty simple but I still had to think before I started. Is the bite on the left or the right? Which direction does the leaf go? FedEx, with its forward-facing arrow hidden in the negative space between the uppercase E and lowercase X is another fairly easy one, partially because of the simple straight lines, although I couldn’t remember which side of the logo was purple and which was orange. Luckily this was just a sketching exercise and not really about colour. Other logos, like Coca-Cola, has some pretty intricate details that are tricky to accurately recreate. For Disney, I was on track with the “y”, but everything else was a bit, well, off.

The process made me appreciate logo design even more. Designing a logo takes a lot of patience and attention to detail that might go unnoticed to many people in the end. Still, taking the time to go through this is an important step in the creative process.

Some of logos I tried were easy. Others, like my Starbucks attempt, were clearly not.