Essay · Philosophy & Design

What if Plato’s Theory of Forms is the true foundation of successful brands, signs and industrial design?

The Mercedes star, the bitten apple, Dieter Rams’s tuning dial, the green SPAR tree: billions of people have understood them without anyone ever having to explain them. What if they were not invented but remembered — reminders of archetypes that have accompanied humanity for thousands of years?

Michael Saupe · October 2026 · approx. 20 minutes’ read

The thesis in two sentences. According to Plato, we recognise a tree because our soul has already encountered the Idea of the tree; all knowing is remembering. Designed things, brands and signs are most powerful when they claim nothing new but awaken such an archetype: star, sun, tree, fruit, circle and cross.

What if we don’t learn great brands, but recognise them?

Plato’s answer to the question of how knowledge is possible is: we do not learn, we remember. This doctrine of anamnesis is the key to everything that follows in this essay.

The child and the tree

A child who has grown up in Central Europe sees a palm tree for the first time on a beach in Crete. It has no crown of leaves, no branches, no bark like the oak in the city park. And yet the child says without hesitation: “Tree.”

How does it know? No tree it has ever seen looked like this palm. So it must know something that all trees have in common and that is fully present in no single tree.

Knowing is remembering

Plato poses exactly this riddle in the dialogue Phaedo (73c–77a). Socrates asks: we see two pieces of wood and call them “equal”, although two pieces of wood are never perfectly equal. How, then, do we know Equality itself if we have never seen it?

His answer: we must have encountered it before we could perceive with our senses. The individual thing is merely the prompt that awakens a memory. Plato calls this remembering anamnesis.

In the dialogue Meno (81a–86b), Socrates demonstrates the proof. Through skilful questioning, an uneducated slave discovers a geometrical truth nobody has taught him: the square on the diagonal has twice the area. The knowledge was already there; it only had to be awakened.

The soul has already beheld the Ideas

Where does this prior knowledge come from? In the Phaedrus (246a–249d), Plato paints a grand picture: before birth, the soul travels across the heavens like a charioteer and beholds the Ideas themselves — the Just, the Beautiful, the Good, the pure archetypes of all things.

At birth it forgets what it has seen. Yet every thing in the world carries a trace of its archetype. When we encounter it, the memory stirs, and we recognise.

The Idea (Greek idea or eidos, “form”, “appearance”) is, for Plato, the unchanging, perfect archetype of a thing. The things of the world are its imperfect copies. The tree outside the window grows and dies; the Idea of the tree remains.

How many Ideas are there?

Plato names no fixed number of Ideas. According to his theory, every group of things that share a name and form a kind has exactly one eternal and perfect Idea; every concept therefore corresponds to an archetype. The number of Ideas is thus unlimited and matches the variety of general concepts.

In the dialogues, Plato names Ideas of very different kinds: mathematical forms such as the circle, natural things such as tree, horse or human being, qualities such as warmth, size and colour, values such as justice and courage. Particularly remarkable for designers: everyday objects have their Idea too — bed and table in the Republic, the weaver’s shuttle in the Cratylus. Only for purely negative collective terms such as “non-Greek” did he reject a separate Idea, because their members have nothing in common.

Plato never wrote a self-contained account of his Theory of Forms. The overall picture is pieced together from many scattered passages in his dialogues, and scholars still debate the details today.

The order of the world of Ideas

The Ideas do not form an unordered set but a hierarchy. The more general an Idea, the higher it stands, for it encompasses the more specific ones; the lower Ideas participate in the higher.

At the top stands a single supreme Idea, the Idea of the Good. It gives all other Ideas their being and their knowability, just as the sun illuminates the world and makes it grow.

Below it, in his late work Sophist (254b–255e), Plato names the five “greatest kinds” (mégista génē). As fundamental categories they govern the structure of all being and of the world of Ideas itself: Being (ón), everything that is at all; Motion (kínēsis), the principle of change and becoming; Rest (stásis), the principle of permanence; the Same (tautón), the principle of identity; and the Different (tháteron), the principle of difference.

With these five kinds, Plato solves an ancient riddle: how can one say something false if non-being does not exist? Motion and Rest exclude each other, yet both participate in Being; each kind is the same as itself and different from the others. Non-being is therefore not absolute nothingness but the Different: whoever says “the table is not green” is only saying that its colour differs from green.

For designers, this holds a surprisingly practical idea. Every successful sign unites the Same with the Different: it is instantly recognised as an archetype, yet unmistakably distinct from all other signs. And it unites Rest with Motion — a permanent image that nevertheless radiates life.

Imitation and the best form

In his late dialogues, Plato describes the relationship between things and Ideas as imitation (mímēsis). The more faithfully a living being or a thing reproduces the archetype of its kind, the closer it comes to its best form and realises its aretḗ, its fitness and excellence. Here lies the Platonic root of the thought that everything strives towards the best form of its kind.

Applied to brands, this means: a sign that touches such an archetype does not have to be learned. It is recognised — in fractions of a second, across languages, cultures and generations.

Are you already among the archetypes, or still living among the copies?

Plato’s most famous allegory asks a question every designer, every brand and every human being must face: do we take the shadows on the wall for reality? Archetype, copy and truth are, for Plato, three stations along a single path.

The Allegory of the Cave: shadows on the wall

In the seventh book of the Republic, Plato describes people chained in an underground cave since childhood, their gaze fixed on the wall. Behind them a fire burns, and between the fire and the prisoners objects are carried past. The prisoners see only their shadows and take them for the whole of reality.

If one of them is freed, the light of the fire hurts him at first. Led out into daylight, he is dazzled; only gradually does he recognise the things themselves and finally the sun that makes everything visible. When he returns and tells the others, they laugh at him and cling to their shadows.

Archetype and copy: the levels of being

In the Allegory of the Divided Line, Plato arranges the world in four levels: at the bottom shadows and reflections, above them visible things, then mathematical objects, and at the top the Ideas. Each level is a copy of the one above. The tree in the garden is a copy of the Idea of the tree; its shadow on the lawn is a copy of a copy.

Each level corresponds to a mode of knowing: conjecture (eikasía) for shadows, belief (pístis) for things, discursive thought (diánoia) for mathematics and intellection (nóēsis) for the Ideas. Whoever knows only copies has opinions. Whoever beholds the archetypes has knowledge.

Truth: what is wrested from oblivion

For Plato, what is true is what truly is. The Ideas are what genuinely exists (óntōs ón), things merely participate in them, and their copies stand furthest from the truth. According to the tenth book of the Republic (597e), the painter who paints a bed is an imitator at the third remove from truth: he depicts not the Idea but only the carpenter’s bed, and even that only as it appears from one side.

The Greek word for truth, alḗtheia, can be read as unconcealment: that which has been wrested from oblivion (lḗthē). Martin Heidegger made this reading famous in the twentieth century. It closes the circle to anamnesis: truth is not something one invents, but something that emerges again from oblivion.

The cave of Instagram and Pinterest

Plato’s cave now has a screen. On Instagram and Pinterest, seemingly brilliant design solutions scroll past every second: logos, websites, interiors and packaging, perfectly lit and shared thousands of times. Scroll long enough and you believe you have understood design — after all, all that is left to do is choose.

But what passes by are shadows on the wall. Every motif is the copy of a copy: a logo modelled on another logo, a moodboard made of moodboards, a website in the style of whichever website is currently being celebrated. The algorithm favours what has already been liked, and so the spiral tightens ever more around the same mediocrity.

Artificial intelligence accelerates this cycle. Have an AI confirm, combine or regenerate the images you have chosen, and you get back the average of all the shadows it has ever seen. The result is not an archetype but mush: smooth, pleasing and interchangeable.

In our agency we have long felt the countermovement. More and more clients open the first conversation with a sentence that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: “I want a presence with an idea, a website with character — no AI sauce and no arbitrary mediocrity.” Without quoting Plato, they want out of the cave.

Tasteslop: when good taste turns into mush

Since 2026 this phenomenon has had a name. The American trend forecaster and writer Emily Segal, co-founder of the collective K-HOLE, which once coined the term “normcore”, calls it tasteslop. It describes the inflation and homogenisation of good taste through algorithms, social media and artificial intelligence.

Segal’s examples are objects that once served as proof of style: Rimowa suitcases, Maison Margiela Tabi shoes, the Togo sofa, the gooseneck kettle. Each of them once said something about the person who chose it. Repeated thousands of times in the feed, they now say something only about the feed.

Taste, as Segal puts it in essence, is not a property of things themselves but a relationship between things, people, stories and the right moment. Where this relationship breaks down, only the symbols remain — imitated thoughtlessly, without style of one’s own and without personal meaning.

As an antidote, Segal names three abilities: discernment, the ability to justify why something is truly good; pattern recognition, a feel for art history and cultural references; and idiosyncrasy, a personal, grown signature that can hardly be copied.

Read through Plato, tasteslop describes exactly the lowest level of the Divided Line: copies of copies mistaken for the thing itself. And Segal’s three abilities are the way out: discerning instead of adopting, knowing where forms come from, and having the courage to ask about the essence of one’s own cause rather than about the next trend.

Turning around: from the feed to the Idea

Read through Plato, the great designers in this essay turned around long before there were feeds. Rams did not ask what other radios looked like, but what a radio is. Loewy did not draw yet another shell but reduced it to its basic form. Stankowski did not depict bank buildings but order and growth. They took the path out of the cave towards the Idea, and that is why billions of people recognise their signs.

Which leaves the question from the heading, put to every designer, every brand and every reader: are you already among the archetypes, or still living among the copies? The test is simple. Don’t ask what the others are doing. Ask what the thing truly is.

What if good design invents nothing, but reminds us of something we have long known?

For Plato, the visible is the privileged place where human beings remember the Ideas. Design thus becomes more than giving form: it is the art of triggering a memory.

Beauty, the only Idea we see with our eyes

The Phaedrus (250b–d) contains a sentence that is electrifying for every designer. Justice, temperance or wisdom, says Plato, have no lustre in their earthly copies. Beauty alone shines brightly through the sharpest of our senses, sight.

This means: the world of Ideas is closed to us, but at one point it has a window. Everyone who sees a perfectly designed thing and feels spontaneously “this is how it must be” is looking through that window.

This feeling of self-evidence is no accident. It is the moment of recognition. A sign does not feel “right” because it is new, but because it hits something we already know.

The Good as the sun

The highest of all Ideas, for Plato, is the Idea of the Good. In the Allegory of the Sun in the Republic, he compares it to the sun: just as the sun gives things light so that we can see them, and warmth so that they grow, the Good gives everything knowable its knowability and its being.

For Plato, then, the sun is not just one image among many. It is the image of the origin of all order. We will meet it again in this essay — in a radio’s tuning dial and in the wheel of a music player.

All living things strive for their best form — design too

In the Timaeus (29e–30a), Plato tells how the world-builder, the Demiurge, created the cosmos. Because he himself was good, he wanted everything to become as good as possible; in doing so, he looked to the eternal archetype. The world is therefore ordered towards the Good.

From this follows the thought that carries this essay: every tree, every animal, every plant, the human being too, strives for the best form of its kind. Plato’s pupil Aristotle refined this thought and gave it a name: entelechy, the goal a thing carries within itself.

Good design shares this striving. It does not want to be original but good. And it reaches its goal where it comes so close to the archetype that people recognise the Idea in the designed thing.

What if behind every great sign there is an archetype older than any brand?

The most powerful signs of the present draw on a handful of archetypes that have accompanied humanity for millennia: sun and circle, star, tree, fruit, cross and square. Whoever uses them speaks a language every human being understands before they can read.

Sun, circle and wheel

The Nebra sky disc, around 3,600 years old by common dating, shows sun, moon and stars in gold on bronze. It is the oldest known concrete depiction of the sky in the world. Even here, the circle is the sign for the whole, for order and recurrence.

The sun disc becomes the wheel, the clock, the compass rose and the dial. They all share the same Idea: a centre from which all directions are equally reachable and from which one chooses.

The star we navigate by

For millennia, the Pole Star showed seafarers the way. The Star of Bethlehem guided the Magi. The star is the archetype of orientation: something distant and unreachable that nevertheless points the way.

Whoever “follows their star” follows a calling. Hardly any archetype is so strongly linked with ambition, purpose and excellence.

The Tree of Life and the fruit of knowledge

In the Paradise of Genesis stand two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. In Norse mythology, the world ash Yggdrasil carries the cosmos. Trees of life appear from Mesopotamia to the woven carpets of Anatolia.

The tree stands for growth, nourishment, shelter and rootedness. Its fruit stands for knowledge and temptation at once. We will meet both again at SPAR and at Apple.

Cross and square

The cross divides the world into four directions and marks a centre. The square stands for the built, the ordered, what human beings have secured. How powerful these two forms are is shown by the history of the city, to which the next section is devoted.

Jung’s archetypes as descendants of Plato’s Ideas

In the twentieth century, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung described primordial images of the collective unconscious, which he called archetypes. He explicitly referred to Plato’s Ideas as their forerunners in intellectual history.

Whether one takes Plato’s journey of the soul literally or Jung’s unconscious: both describe the same observation. Certain images need no explanation because they are already within us.

What if our cities are built on the same archetypes as our signs?

The two strongest primal signs of order, the circle with its crossed axes and the gridded square, have shaped not only logos but the ground plans of our cities. A line runs from the Roman city foundation through the military camp to the street grid of Manhattan.

Circle and cross: the oldest sign of the city

In Egyptian hieroglyphs, a circle divided by two crossing roads simply means “city”. The sign is more than 4,000 years old and already describes everything essential: a boundary separating inside from outside, and a centre where the roads meet.

Plato himself also thought of the city as round. In the Laws (745b–e), his late work on the best state, he places the city in the middle of the land, with the sanctuary at the centre and twelve parts radiating from it. The city is to be an image of the cosmic order.

The Roman city foundation: crossed axes and a sacred centre

The Romans adopted the founding of a city as a sacred act from the Etruscans. The founding myth tells that Romulus dug a pit at the centre, the mundus, and ploughed a furrow around the future city, the sulcus primigenius. This furrow marked the pomerium, the sacred boundary between city and land.

At the centre, the crossed axes were fixed with the groma, a cross of two right-angled sighting rods: the cardo maximus from north to south and the decumanus maximus from east to west. Archaeoastronomical studies show that the decumanus was often aligned with the sunrise on a particular feast day.

At the intersection of the two axes lay the forum, the religious and political heart of the city. The founding itself was performed by the augur, the bird-watcher who read the will of the gods; Romulus was considered king and augur in one person. Supreme oversight of the cult lay with the Pontifex Maximus, literally the “greatest bridge-builder” between gods and humans. From Augustus onwards, every Roman emperor bore this title: the ruler thus stood symbolically at the centre of the sacred order.

The circle with the cross is therefore no abstract pattern. It is the image of a world that has a centre, and of a person who bears responsibility at that centre.

The Roman military camp: the square as order

Where the city foundation was sacred, the military camp, the castrum, was practical. In the 2nd century BC, the Greek historian Polybius described the Roman camp as a square layout that every legion built to the same plan anywhere in the world. Every soldier knew where his tent stood — even at night, even in foreign lands.

The main streets had fixed names. The via principalis crossed the camp between the porta principalis dextra and sinistra. The via praetoria led from the main gate, the porta praetoria, to the centre; its continuation, the via decumana, ended at the porta decumana. Where the axes met stood the principia, the headquarters building, and the praetorium, the commander’s tent.

Many of these camps became cities. In Regensburg, the former legionary fortress Castra Regina, and in Turin, Roman Augusta Taurinorum, the grid can still be read in the city plan today. Aosta in northern Italy, founded in 25 BC, also retains its almost perfectly rectangular ring of walls.

Gortyn: Roman order on Crete

Gortyn lies in the Messara plain in the south of Crete. Already in Greek times it was one of the most powerful cities on the island, famous for its law code carved in stone. After the Roman conquest of Crete in 67 BC, Gortyn became, from 27 BC, the capital of the province of Creta et Cyrenaica, which comprised Crete and today’s eastern Libya.

Walking today among the olive trees through the ruins of the praetorium, odeon and nymphaeum, one sees how Rome carried its administrative order to the edge of the world. From here, law, taxes and roads were administered for a territory spanning two continents.

From Rome to Manhattan: the grid as legacy

The Greeks knew the right-angled grid before Rome; Hippodamus of Miletus planned cities on a chessboard pattern in the 5th century BC. Rome, however, turned it into a system that could be repeated across an empire. This system lived on: in the Spanish colonial cities of the Americas, laid out from 1573 according to royal ordinances in a grid around a plaza, in Mannheim’s city of squares from 1606, and in Philadelphia, planned by William Penn in 1682.

It found its greatest expression in 1811 in the Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan. Twelve avenues run from south to north, hundreds of streets cross them from east to west: cardo and decumanus, repeated a thousand times. Only Broadway, an old trail, cuts diagonally across the grid and, where it meets the avenues, creates the city’s most famous squares, from Times Square to the Flatiron Building.

The square with the diagonal: we will meet this figure again shortly, in the logo of one of Europe’s largest banks.

What if the iPod, the Mercedes star and the SPAR tree share the same secret?

The most successful signs and products of the 20th century have one thing in common: they do not invent a new visual language, they awaken an archetype. This is evident in the work of Raymond Loewy, Dieter Rams, Anton Stankowski and Jony Ive, as well as at Mercedes-Benz and Apple.

The Mercedes star: the archetype of the guiding star

As technical director of the Deutz gas engine factory, Gottlieb Daimler marked the family home with a star on a postcard showing a view of Deutz in 1872. Some thirty years later — Daimler had died in 1900 — Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft, at the suggestion of its chairman of the supervisory board, Alfred von Kaulla, was looking for a memorable sign for its Mercedes cars.

The idea came from his sons Paul and Adolf Daimler: they remembered their father’s postcard and suggested adopting this star as the company logo. On 24 June 1909, DMG registered the three-pointed star for protection; it stands for Daimler engines on land, on water and in the air. The ring was added in 1916, and the laurel wreath in 1926 after the merger with Benz & Cie.

The most famous emblem in automotive history was thus born, quite literally, of an act of remembrance. The star is the archetype of orientation and of striving for the highest. Whoever follows a star follows the best of its kind — and that is exactly the brand promise.

Apple’s apple knows more than its designer

Apple’s first logo of 1976 showed Isaac Newton under an apple tree, an image of insight. In 1977 Rob Janoff designed the bitten apple, initially in rainbow colours. Janoff has always explained that the bite was there mainly so that, at small sizes, the apple would not be mistaken for a cherry.

The world nevertheless saw something else: the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, Eve, the temptation of knowledge. Here anamnesis shows itself in its purest form. The Idea lies not in the logo but in the beholder; the sign merely awakens it. A designer can hit an archetype without intending to — and the archetype still works.

Dieter Rams and the Braun T3: the sun disc for choosing

From 1955 to 1997, Dieter Rams shaped the design of Braun, influenced by the Bauhaus and the Ulm School of Design. In 1958 the T3 pocket radio appeared: a plain white rectangle, a perforated field for the loudspeaker and a round dial for tuning.

This dial is more than a control. It is the sun disc and the compass rose, the archetype of the circle from whose centre all directions are equally reachable and from which a person chooses their direction. Nobody had to learn how to operate it; one understood it before touching it.

Less, but better.
Dieter Rams

Read through Plato, Rams’s maxim means: leave out everything that does not belong to the Idea, until only the archetype is visible.

Jony Ive and the iPod: the same ascent to the Idea, twice

In 2001 Apple presented the iPod, designed by the team around Jonathan Ive. The resemblance to the Braun T3 is unmistakable, and Ive has never hidden his admiration for Rams; he even wrote the foreword to a book about him. Rams himself has repeatedly named Apple as one of the few companies designing according to his principles.

The iPod’s later click wheel made the sun disc the centre of a digital device. Hundreds of millions of people understood it immediately, across all languages, without instructions.

So is the iPod a copy? Read through Plato, no. A copy would, for Plato, be the copy of a copy, two steps removed from the truth (Republic 597e). Ive did not copy Rams; on a new technical foundation, he ascended a second time to the same Idea. That is why the wheel felt not like a quotation but like something self-evident.

Raymond Loewy and the SPAR tree: the power of the seemingly primitive

Raymond Loewy (1893–1986), the Paris-born pioneer of American industrial design, designed locomotives, the Greyhound bus, the Lucky Strike pack, the Shell and Exxon logos and the livery of Air Force One. In 1968 his Paris office, the Compagnie de l’Esthétique Industrielle, gave the SPAR logo the form it still has today.

The sign seems almost primitive: a green fir tree, a wordmark. Yet the tree is built into the very name, for spar is the Dutch word for fir; originally, DESPAR stood for a motto about working together for everyone’s benefit. The tree that grows, shelters and nourishes everyone is the archetype of exactly this idea.

Loewy formulated the principle behind it himself: MAYA, “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”. The new is only accepted if it connects to the familiar. In the language of an industrial designer, that is nothing other than Plato’s anamnesis.

Raymond Loewy and the Shell scallop: the archetype in strict geometry

Three years after SPAR, in 1971, Loewy also gave the Shell emblem the form it still has today. The name goes back to Marcus Samuel senior, who imported seashells from the Far East to London in the late 19th century; his sons chose “Shell” as the name for the kerosene they shipped to Asia.

The first emblem of 1901 was a mussel shell; from 1904 it was followed by the scallop, Latin Pecten. Loewy did not reinvent this image. He placed the shell on a strict geometric construction and built it from a few warm, soft curves until only its essence remained.

The shell is one of the oldest archetypes of the sea, of origin and of protection; since the Middle Ages, the scallop has also been the sign of pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. That Shell has been able to show its emblem mostly without a wordmark for over 50 years confirms this essay’s thesis: an archetype needs no label.

Anton Stankowski and Deutsche Bank: the square and the diagonal

In April 1974, Deutsche Bank introduced its new logo, the “slash in the square”. In a competition with eight invited designers and around 140 entries, Anton Stankowski (1906–1998), the Stuttgart graphic designer and painter of concrete art, prevailed.

The sign consists of two primal forms. The square is the archetype of the built, the secured, of order — the same form as the Roman castrum. Within it, the diagonal rises from bottom left to top right: the archetype of growth. The bank still interprets it today as growth within a secure framework.

That the logo has existed for more than 50 years without the slightest revision and has effortlessly made the leap from letterhead to smartphone is the best proof: a sign that comes close to an Idea does not need to be modernised.

The shared secret

Star, apple, sun disc, tree, shell, square with diagonal: none of these signs is explained by a text. Each awakens an image that people have known for millennia. That is the shared secret of the most successful brands: they are not learned, they are recognised.

What does it remind us of? The most important question in design

The most important question for designers and brands is not “What is new?” but “What does it remind us of?”. Whoever takes it seriously looks not for the most original form, but for the form that comes closest to an archetype.

Three guiding questions follow for every brand, every sign and every product. First: which archetype does the thing carry within it? Star, sun, tree, fruit, circle, square or another image that people understand without explanation. Second: what can be left out until only the Idea is visible? Every superfluous detail conceals the archetype instead of showing it. Third: does the design strive for the Good? Not for the eye-catching, but for the best of its kind, just as Plato assumed for all living things.

2,400 years ago, Plato described what the most successful designers of the 20th century discovered in their practice. The Ideas have not disappeared; they wait within us to be recognised. Good design is the art of bringing about this moment of recognition.

Glossary

The thinkers, designers and terms used in this essay at a glance.

Philosophers & thinkers

Plato

Athenian philosopher (428/427–348/347 BC), pupil of Socrates and founder of the Theory of Forms. Key dialogues for this essay: Phaedo, Meno, Phaedrus, Republic, Timaeus, Sophist and Laws.

Socrates

Athenian philosopher and Plato’s teacher; leads the conversation in most of the dialogues.

Aristotle

Plato’s pupil, who criticised the Theory of Forms; coined the concept of entelechy, the inner goal of a thing.

Carl Gustav Jung

Swiss psychiatrist (1875–1961), founder of analytical psychology; described archetypes as primordial images of the collective unconscious.

Polybius

Greek historian (c. 200–120 BC); described the square Roman military camp.

Hippodamus of Miletus

Greek town planner of the 5th century BC; considered the father of the grid city.

Designers & brands

Raymond Loewy

French-American industrial designer (1893–1986); designed locomotives, the Lucky Strike pack, the Shell and Exxon logos and, in 1968, the current form of the SPAR logo, among others.

Dieter Rams

German industrial designer (*1932), at Braun from 1955 to 1997; designer of the T3 pocket radio (1958) and author of the maxim “Less, but better”.

Jony Ive

British designer (*1967), long-time head of design at Apple; his team designed the iPod in 2001.

Anton Stankowski

German graphic designer and painter of concrete art (1906–1998) with a studio in Stuttgart; created Deutsche Bank’s “slash in the square” in 1974.

Rob Janoff

American graphic designer; designed Apple’s bitten apple in 1977.

Gottlieb Daimler

German engineer (1834–1900); in 1872 marked his home in Deutz with a star on a postcard, the later model for the Mercedes star.

Emily Segal

American trend forecaster, artist and writer (*1988), co-founder of the trend collective K-HOLE; coined the term tasteslop in 2026.

Max Bill

Swiss architect, artist and designer (1908–1994), co-founder and first rector of the Ulm School of Design; coined the notion of “Good Form”.

Otl Aicher

German designer (1922–1991), co-founder of the Ulm School of Design; created, among other things, the corporate design of Lufthansa and the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Hans Gugelot

Designer and lecturer at the Ulm School of Design (1920–1965); designed the Braun SK 4 radio-phonograph together with Dieter Rams in 1956.

Louis Sullivan

American architect (1856–1924); the principle “form follows function” goes back to him.

Marcus Samuel

British entrepreneur (1853–1927), founder of the Shell Transport and Trading Company; the name Shell goes back to his father’s trade in seashells.

Terms & concepts

Idea / Form (idea, eidos)

For Plato, the eternal, unchanging and perfect archetype of a thing; visible things are its copies.

Anamnesis

Recollection: according to Plato, knowing is remembering the Ideas the soul beheld before birth.

Idea of the Good

The highest of all Ideas; it gives all others being and knowability. Plato compares it with the sun in the Allegory of the Sun.

Allegory of the Cave

Plato’s allegory from the Republic (514a–517a) of prisoners who take shadows for reality; an image of the path from copy to archetype.

Divided Line

Plato’s division of reality into four levels — shadows, visible things, mathematical objects and Ideas — with the modes of knowing eikasía, pístis, diánoia and nóēsis.

Archetype and copy

The archetype is the perfect Idea of a thing, the copy its imperfect reproduction; a copy of a copy stands even further from the truth.

Alētheia

Greek for truth; can be read as unconcealment, that which is wrested from oblivion (lḗthē).

Mégista génē

The five “greatest kinds” from Plato’s Sophist: Being, Motion, Rest, the Same and the Different.

Mimesis

Imitation; in Plato’s late work, the relationship of things to their archetypes.

Aretē

Fitness, excellence: the best form a thing reaches when it faithfully realises its archetype.

Demiurge

The world-builder in Plato’s Timaeus who shapes the cosmos as well as possible by looking to the eternal archetype.

Entelechy

Aristotelian term for the goal a thing carries within itself and towards which it grows.

Archetype (Jung)

For C. G. Jung, a primordial image of the collective unconscious that recurs in myths, symbols and dreams.

MAYA principle

Raymond Loewy’s formula “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”: the new is accepted when it connects to the familiar.

Brand & design

Brand emblem

The graphic sign by which a brand is recognised; legally protected as a trademark, in everyday use mostly called a logo.

Logo

Short for logotype; today an umbrella term for a company’s pictorial mark, wordmark and combination mark.

Pictorial mark

A brand emblem without lettering, such as the Mercedes star, the Apple apple or the Shell scallop.

Combination mark

A combination of sign and wordmark, as with SPAR’s fir tree and name.

Branding

The process of giving a brand a recognisable identity, from name and emblem to language, product and behaviour.

Corporate design

The consistent visual identity of a company: emblem, colours, typefaces, grids and their application.

Brand core

The central idea a brand stands for and to which all signs and messages lead back.

Recognition value

A sign’s ability to be recognised quickly and reliably; according to this essay, the higher the closer it comes to an archetype.

Functionalism

A design attitude that derives form from the purpose and use of an object.

Form follows function

Guiding principle of modernism after Louis Sullivan (1896): the shape of a thing results from its task.

Good Form

Term coined by Max Bill for objective, long-lasting design committed to use; title of his 1949 exhibition.

Ulm School of Design

Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (1953–1968), the most influential design school of the post-war era; close collaboration with Braun.

Concrete art

An art movement working with purely geometric means without depicting anything; its representatives include Max Bill and Anton Stankowski.

Kouros

Archaic Greek statue of a naked youth showing not an individual but a type, such as the Apollo of Tenea.

Tasteslop

Emily Segal’s term (2026) for the inflation and homogenisation of good taste through algorithms, social media and AI.

City & order

Cardo maximus

North–south main axis of a Roman city.

Decumanus maximus

East–west main axis of a Roman city; often aligned with the sunrise on a feast day.

Groma

Roman surveying instrument of two sighting rods crossed at right angles, used to fix the crossed axes.

Pomerium

The sacred boundary of a Roman city, drawn with the plough as the sulcus primigenius.

Pontifex Maximus

Rome’s supreme priest, literally the “greatest bridge-builder”; a title of the emperors from Augustus onwards.

Castrum

Roman military camp with a fixed square plan, camp streets and four gates; the nucleus of many cities.

Commissioners’ Plan

The 1811 plan that divided Manhattan into a right-angled grid of avenues and streets.

FAQ

Sources

Plato passages according to Stephanus pagination: Phaedo 73c–77a · Meno 81a–86b · Phaedrus 246a–250d · Republic 509d–517a (Divided Line and Cave) · Sophist 254b–259b · Republic 507b–509b, 597e · Timaeus 29e–30a · Laws 745b–e.

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Michael Saupe — writes about marketing, art and the ideas behind them. More essays at michaelsaupe.com.