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In an exploration of brand identity and our ability to recognize popular logos, designer Graham Smith reduced dozens of popular logos to simple circles and colors.⁷ See how many of these “unevolved brands” you recognize in Figure 3.4.

FIGURE 3.4 Six logos reduced to circles and base colors. We recognize most or all of these abstractions because they call to mind prior associations with a similar, previous encounter.

Chances are you do recognize most or all of these logos. Here’s something interesting. Suppose that you don’t recognize one of these logos. This might occur because either you’ve never encountered it before, which means there’s no pattern to match with, or you’re not able to recall the pattern at this moment. For this latter case, close this book. Go do something else. Come back, and you may recognize that logo when there’s a different set of associations bouncing around in your brain.

Here’s a similar abstraction of characters from four popular cartoon or children’s TV shows.⁸ See how many of these you can identify in Figure 3.5.

FIGURE 3.5 An abstraction of characters from four popular cartoon or children’s TV shows. We recognize these because of the brain’s associative pattern-matching abilities. If you do not recognize one or more of these, it’s because you can’t recall seeing a similar pattern.

The real question for both of these examples: How is it that you’re able to recognize these logos and cartoon references? After all, these are nothing more than shapes and colors.

This is the brain’s associative pattern matching at work. Assuming that you’ve seen this pattern before, or something like it, you are thus able to make a match. Let’s focus on this “seen it before” aspect, as here’s where things get really interesting.