Standing For Something

How the study worked

Three Audience Perception Maps, twelve images each. Posters, packaging, editorial layouts and cultural ephemera, sourced from Pinterest searches for terms like “America branding” and “American graphic design,” spanning the overtly patriotic to the merely decorative. Fifty-seven people got green dots and red dots and one prompt: green on the images you most associate with “American,” red on the images you least associate with it.

The test went to a general audience without demographic segmentation, distributed mainly through LinkedIn on June 27, 2025. At the 75% threshold the 36 images sort into three constellations: eleven resonant, eleven resistant, and fourteen that split the room. See the full report for the complete semiotic analysis.

The dividing line is purpose, not style

Line all 36 images up by the share of dots they took green and the first thing you notice is what does not sort them. The geometric flag stamp is pure abstraction: flat colour, diagonal planes, no texture. The Chambray maker’s mark is weathered, typographically irregular, materially specific. Both score above 87%. The 1984 Olympics mark is kinetic Swiss-influenced modernism and shares the winning column with distressed industrial badges and commemorative portraiture.

Colour does not sort them either. Red, white and blue saturate the rejected images as heavily as the accepted ones. The single most rejected image in the study is a red-white-blue geometric pattern.

Figure 1 · Every image, ranked

What the two ends share is not a look. It is a job. Participants were not responding to formal qualities; they were responding to what the image is for. A clean modernist stamp reads as American because stamps are American civic infrastructure. A weathered maker’s mark reads as American because it certifies domestic production. The purpose, not the aesthetic, carries the meaning.

What resonated: standing for something

Eleven images cleared the 75% resonance threshold, and they cohere around civic, commemorative and institutional functions. Three families dominate.

Historical figures as national monuments. Martin Luther King Jr. at 97.4% and John F. Kennedy at 95.0% appear not as biographical portraits but as symbols of national ideals, the one rendered with his signature and a flag overlay, the other set against the Earth itself in a moon-speech composition. Lincoln arrives in illustrative form at 91.3%. These are not depictions of people. They are depictions of what those people represent in collective memory.

Government and civic marks. USPS stamps account for several of the strongest performers, the geometric flag abstraction at 97.2% and the chevron heart design at 75.0%. The 1984 LA Olympics logo at 76.0% represents America in international civic competition. The Made in USA industrial badge at 93.8% carries the weight of certification. These images derive their American-ness from institutional origin, not visual style.

Commemoration and provenance. The Memorial Day typography at 90.9% and the hand-crafted NYC maker’s mark at 87.5% point backward, honouring sacrifice and certifying authentic origin. They position America as something with a past worth remembering, not a brand to be promoted.

The outlier

American Funship at 86.4% is explicitly commercial: cruise-line branding. It scored with the monuments anyway. Participants may not have recognised the contemporary Carnival brand, reading the retro script and solid red field as a mid-century artefact instead. Or the word “American” in the name overrode the commercial context. Either way it is the exception that shows the rule: it won by looking like something that stood for something.

What was rejected: selling something

Eleven images crossed the 75% resistance threshold. They use the same vocabulary as the winners, stars, stripes, red, white, blue, vintage type, and deploy it toward different ends. Four failure modes emerge.

Design without purpose. The orange ampersand at 96.3% red, the blue striped numeral at 92.1% and the geometric 3D pattern at 97.2%, the single most rejected image, are formally accomplished and contextually empty. They exist as aesthetic objects rather than functional communications. Participants appear to require that American visual identity do something: certify, commemorate, represent.

Heritage cosplay. The Joel Gott wine label at 83.3% red references “California Republic” and depicts an American vineyard in vintage-styled type. It mimics the exact strategies that succeed in the resonance column. But it is selling wine, and participants detected this.

Generic corporate identity. HNB Brilliance at 96.4% and Liberty Warehouse at 86.7% use clean contemporary design that could belong to any company, anywhere. Their competent neutrality is precisely what disqualifies them. Foreign institutional markers. The DAAD poster at 87.0% is literally European. The Boston College seal at 79.2% represents an American institution in heraldic vocabulary, Latin text, ecclesiastical crowns, medieval shield, and reads as Continental. Visual grammar overrides geographic fact.

The whole study in two images

The most decisive verdict on each side of the line. One is a man rendered as what he stands for. The other is red, white and blue arranged to look good on a surface.

Same three colours. The room needed no instruction to tell which one meant something.

Same palette, different meaning

The cleaner pair is two abstractions of the same flag. The stamp is a stamp: it has civic function, institutional sanction, the implicit context of mail delivery. The stripes are purely decorative, and their decorative purpose strips them of national meaning. American-ness is not a property of visual elements. It is a property of what those elements are understood to be for.

Where America is contested

Fourteen images fell below threshold in both directions. They look at first like images that failed to register. They are the opposite: the images where participants actively disagree about what counts as American. The Andra Day Austin City Limits poster split the sample exactly in half. Compare that to MLK at 97% and the pattern at 97% red, where consensus was near-total. This is polarisation, not indifference.

The fault lines are legible. Historical versus contemporary Black culture: MLK resonated near-unanimously; Andra Day split the room. The “American” frame accommodates Black figures more readily as historical monuments than as living cultural producers. Regional specificity: Texas (Roy’s Trucks, 44.4%) and California (Madson of America, 42.9%) read as credential to some and provincial to others. Military nostalgia: the WWII Rise Above poster at 45.5% has every marker that wins elsewhere and divided the sample anyway. Sports: Jackie Robinson at 47.8% and the vintage football site at 35.7% are culturally American and ideologically muted.

For practitioners the contested constellation may be the most valuable output. The resonance column shows safe territory; the resistance column shows what to avoid. The middle shows where identity is being actively negotiated, where a design choice will resonate with some audiences and alienate others. Depending on the objective, that is exactly where to operate, or exactly where not to.

What to do with this

The underlying mental model is simple to state: American visual identity must be earned, not designed. Images succeed when they appear to emerge from American institutions, history or collective enterprise. They fail when they appear constructed for commercial or purely aesthetic purposes, even with identical elements. Commercial imagery has to borrow that authority, and the borrowing is detectable.

Methodology and confidence

Fifty-seven survey completions using dot-drag visual sorting on three boards of twelve, classified at a 75% threshold. The image set was assembled casually from Pinterest searches, which likely shaped the results: Pinterest surfaces imagery that already performs well in its own visual economy. The sample was a general audience without demographic segmentation. The civic-versus-commercial distinction showed strong consensus across many images and supports the core finding. Interpretations of the contested zone should be treated with caution at this sample size. One more thing the report noted: anchoring on the minority, the two participants who rejected JFK, revealed internally coherent alternative frameworks. The tool can surface latent audience segments through behaviour rather than self-report.

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