How to Play On Brand: Rules, Scoring and Sharing

On Brand is a free logo color game. A real company logo appears with one part in the wrong color, and you give that part back the brand's true color from memory. There is no clock, no sign-up and no limit on rounds.

Here is everything a first round involves, in the order you will meet it.

1. Choose a collection and press Start round.
2. A logo appears, and a line traces the part that is in the wrong color.
3. Move the hue, saturation and brightness sliders until the part matches the color you remember.
4. Press Lock color, or Enter, and see your color beside the real one with a score out of 10.
5. After three logos, see your round out of 30, then share it or play the next.

The start screen asks "You know the logo. Can you mix its missing color?" and offers six collections (the lobby calls them decks), each a slice of over 900 real company logos:

• Famous: household names, about a hundred of them. Start here.
• Fortune 500: the largest American companies.
• Big tech: the tech companies people know across their markets.
• Consumer: brands people buy from every day, the largest collection after Everything.
• Startups: younger companies. How you do depends on how closely you follow new ones.
• Everything: the whole catalog.

The game remembers the collection you last chose, and keeps your best round and average for each one separately.

Press Start round and three beats count you in, one a second: Ready, Set, Go. Then the first logo appears, with "Logo 1 of 3" in the top left corner of the card and the company's name in the top right.

The logo arrives with one part missing. A thin line draws itself round that part in the wrong color, and then the part fills in behind it. That traced outline is your cue: this is the piece to fix. Everything else in the logo keeps its real colors, so the rest of the logo is there to help you.

About a second later the three sliders slide in, and from then on the part follows them as you move them. On the first logo of a visit, unless the card is very short, a line reminds you what to do: mix the outlined part's original color, and take your time.

The wrong color is never a near neighbor of the right one. Its hue is always at least 60 degrees round the color wheel from the answer, so a part that arrives orange is not a red, an orange or a yellow. Its saturation and brightness are random, so they tell you nothing.

The three sliders, from the top:

• Hue, 0 to 359 degrees: which color it is, from red through yellow, green, blue and purple back to red.
• Saturation, 0 to 100 percent: how vivid it is, from gray to full color.
• Brightness, 0 to 100 percent: how much light it has, from black to full strength.

Each bar is painted with the colors it can make, so the color under its knob is the one it sets. Press anywhere on a bar to jump there, then drag. Right is always more. What each slider does has a step-by-step method for mixing a color.

On a keyboard, a focused slider moves one step with the arrow keys, ten steps with Shift and an arrow or with Page Up and Page Down, and to either end with Home and End.

When the part looks right, press Lock color, or Enter. Take as long as you like: there is no timer on a logo or on a round.

Your score counts up out of 10, to two decimals, with a line to suit it, anything from "Basically a photocopy." to "A brave guess. A wrong one." Below it, two circles zoom in on the part: You, painted in your color, and Brand, in the real one, each labeled with its slider values. That side by side is the most useful view in the game, because you can see which slider was off and which way.

Press Next logo to move on. The key sits where Lock color was and ignores presses for a split second after it appears, so a double tap on Lock cannot skip past your reveal.

The game compares the two colors the way an eye would, with a standard color-difference formula called CIEDE2000, not by how far apart the slider numbers are. A difference you would struggle to see scores above 9.5. One you would notice side by side still scores around 8. A color from the wrong family scores 2 or less. How On Brand scores a color explains the formula and the curve.

A few logos are drawn with gradients. On those, the wrong part is one stop of the ramp, and you match that one color. The rest of the gradient keeps its true colors.

After the third logo, Results shows your round: the total out of 30, a line about how it went, each logo with two small swatches (the brand's color and yours) and its score, and your best round and average for that collection. Beat your best, from your second round in a collection on, and the top of the screen says New best.

From here, Next round deals three more logos from the same collection (Enter works too), and the arrow on the left takes you back to choose another collection.

Share copies a short text to paste anywhere. It opens with On Brand, your total out of 30 and the collection, then gives a line for each logo with a colored square, its score and the brand's name, and ends with a link. The squares are green from 8 points, yellow from 6, orange from 4 and red below 4. No colors go into the text, so nothing in your post gives an answer away.

• Repeats: the game skips the last 120 logos dealt on your device while the collection has others left, which is about 40 rounds. In a smaller collection you may see most of it before one comes back, and a returning logo may ask about a different part.
• What is never asked: black, white and gray parts, and colors too pale or too dark to show a hue (under 20 percent saturation or brightness).
• Records: kept on your device. Signing in is optional, and keeps your best round and average for each collection on your account.
• Sound: on unless you switch it off with the speaker key above the card. The sliders tick as they pass every 15 degrees of hue and every 5 percent of saturation or brightness, and phones that can vibrate give a light buzz with each tick.

Play two or three rounds of Famous before you judge yourself, and watch the two circles on every reveal rather than the score. Once you can see a pattern in your misses, how to get better at On Brand has the fixes for the common ones.