🔎 Logo Crop
The basics
The first view shows roughly nine percent of the logo's area, taken from the centre. Each miss widens the crop until the whole mark is visible.
The image stays in greyscale until you solve it, so colour is deliberately withheld as a clue. You get four guesses.
What to actually look at
Because colour is removed and the crop is central, the useful information is geometric.
- Edges. Are they perfectly straight, mechanically curved, or hand drawn?
- Weight. Thick even strokes suggest a modern wordmark. Thin varied strokes suggest a serif or a script.
- Negative space. A lot of famous marks are defined by the shape of the gap rather than the ink.
- Whether the fragment could be part of a letter. If it could, you are probably looking at a wordmark and not a symbol.
Shapes are not all the same
The frame follows each logo's own proportions. A square badge fills a square frame and a long wordmark fills a wide one. That is a clue in itself before you have read a single edge, because it tells you roughly what kind of mark you are looking at.
A worked crop
The opening crop is a wide frame showing two thick strokes meeting at a shallow angle, with a hard flat cut at the top of each.
Wide frame means wordmark rather than badge. Thick even strokes with flat terminals means a geometric sans serif. That combination already rules out anything script, anything serif, and every circular badge logo. You are looking for a wide, bold, lowercase or uppercase wordmark, and there are not many household names that fit.
Tips worth remembering
- Describe what you see before you try to name it. Naming too early makes you see what you expected.
- Ignore the industry. The crop tells you about the drawing, not the company.
- Use the frame shape as a first filter between wordmarks and symbols.
- If the crop looks like nothing, guess something plausible to buy a wider view. A miss costs one guess but often ends the round.