Here is a link to a very common logo that you’ve all probably seen. Tell me if you can see the arrow without having to look at the clue.
Here is the clue:
It’s between the big E and the x, in the negative space
I’ve found that the only people I try this on who see the arrow right away are small kids who haven’t learned to read yet. Everyone else only sees the letters and refuses to look in between until it’s pointed out. (I didn’t get it either until someone showed me. Now I can’t see anything but the arrow.)
Oh great. I’m a little kid that hasn’t learned to read yet. Damn.
Saw it without the clue, although I will say I’d never noticed it before. Does that make me a slightly bigger kid that can read Dick and Jane books?
I noticed it, but only because you said “see the arrow”. If you hadn’t have said that, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. I’ve looked at this logo a zillion times and never noticed it before.
Aye, that’s something that I’ve noticed myself designing logos.
It’s really really fun and satisfying to create logos that are ambiguously textual/graphic – but they’re problematic because nearly everybody has a blind spot about them.
The FedEx logo is particularly hard for people to “get” because it makes use of negative space, and the text isn’t particularly stylized, so people look at it in “text mode,” without processing it as a graphic.
In some ways, the best logo I ever made was for “Spirit Optical” and the logo consisted of elegant text reading “SPIRIT”, which formed a stylized drawing of a woman’s face. (The letters were mostly formed of arcs- the “s” and the tail of the “p” formed a lock of hair, the loop of the “p” the left frame of her eyeglasses, the “I” and part of the tail of the “R” the bridge of her nose, the top curve of the "R"the right eyeglass frame, and the “IT” the edge of her face and some hair. (Damn I wish I could just link to the logo, that really sucks as a description.)
Anyway, it was weird. People generally either saw the word “SPIRIT”, or they saw a simple line drawing of a woman with nice hair and fashionable frames. (In about equal numbers.) Very few people saw both without being told that they’d missed something.
So in other ways, it was a very unsuccessful logo, as it totally lacked immediacy, and people don’t spend a lot of time contemplating logos.
Made me happy, though.
I did quite a few other logos that were ambiguous in the same way, but quickly learned to stop doing that precisely because that quirk of perception made them kind of pointless.
I saw it without looking at hte spoiler but it took me a few seconds of scanning for it to jump out at me. I would definitely never have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it. Neat.
I noticed it awhile ago, but only because there was another thread on this awhile back. I had to double check the date just to make sure someone hadn’t brought up the old one!
…on a slightly different note, the linked logo is for Cantabury of NZ, one of New Zealand’s largest manufacturers of clothing, that have been around longer than I have been born, and I never noticed the kiwi’s until somebody pointed it out here on the dope…
I thought you meant the small, North West pointing arrow in the tiny circle after the “x”. (Of course, this is just what a capital “R” becomes when reduced in size to that extent.) Double psychology points!
