Sigil Spam / Real Life

• Some inhabitants fit the trope with their country flag or country blazon, or even just working the flag/blazon's color/s into a design.
  • This is how the ubiquity of the American flag in the US feels like to foreign visitors (and even to Americans). Foreigners even have urban legends about the US Government paying filmmakers to add flags on sets^note Though that might be less out of nationalism, and more to make sure the audience knows it's supposed to be set in the US.. Americans can feel this way about Wearing a Flag on Your Head.
  • The Fleur-de-Lis symbol in Louisiana. It's especially noticeable in the stuff they sell in gift shops. Half comes from cultural significance, the other half from a Fleur-de-Lis also being the team logo for the New Orleans Saints (which probably makes the "cultural significance" part somewhat redundant).
  • Texans love to emblazon things with the motif of the Texas flag (which is easily mistaken for a simplified version of the national flag), put Lone Stars on everything, and even produce things shaped like the state itself, right down to tortilla chips and Belgian waffles. Texans love Texas.
  • Chicago does this, not with their flag (though, that's common too), but with a design known as the Municipal Device, which is a 'Y' that represents the Chicago River that you will see emblazoned on practically everything in the city.
  • If something is set in or has its origins in New York City, especially professional sports franchises, expect to see the colors Orange and Blue, taken from NYC's flag (based on an old Dutch design, and from their leader, William of Orange.)
  • Canada is much the same way, putting maple leaves on anything. Plus, their national symbol practically spams itself in autumn in the eastern provinces.
  • On the same note, the province of Quebec, Canada absolutely loves their fleur de lys.
  • The US and Canada (and various states and provinces) seem to have inherited this love from the British, who used to be absolutely enthralled with the Union Jack. They consider it a bit tacky these days, however; Wearing a Flag on Your Head is usually only done ironically and Patriotic Fervor became a Discredited Trope shortly after World War I broke out. That being said, the Royal Arms and the Crown of St. Edward can still be found absolutely everywhere, if used a bit more discreetly; royalty hath its perks.
    • The Union Jack does, however, appear on an awful lot of flags from other countries (And Hawaii's, for some odd reason), usually these places used to be part of the British Empire. One only has to look at international sporting events such as The Olympics to see just how many. It's even worst at the Commomwealth games, where countries that are still own by The UK, compete separately.
• Played straight, invoked, and enforced by various religions. Historically (and today) used in much the same way as corporate logos or national flags are today - to clearly mark areas/property belonging to a group, identify as a member of that group, as a signature, and as a reminder of group loyalty.
• Any promotional item with a corporate, division, or other marking on it. The company-branded pens made available at promotional events come to mind.
  • More insidiously, the promotional items that pharmaceutical representatives leave at doctors' offices.
• One criticism of conspiracy theories is that most of them seem to assume that the conspiracy is more concerned with scattering symbols that point to their existence than they are with actually controlling the world. And yet...
• At Disney Theme Parks, even the manhole covers are emblazoned with the silhouette of Mickey Mouse's head. They're called "Hidden Mickeys" and are more of a Genius Bonus Running Gag, a way for designers to leave a subtle signature on their work — the majority of them are very well hidden. The pattern of large-oval-with-two-smaller-ovals shows up a lot. Whole books have been written on the topic!
  • EPCOT used to have a logo for each Future World pavillion plastered all over them. The last to keep its logo was Spaceship Earth (aka The Big Ball), though Innoventions still had its original CommuniCore logo as the carpet pattern in a hallway in the west building until May 2007. Now the logos show up as Easter eggs in newer rides and on certain limited-edition merchandise (i.e., a set of pins released to mark the park's 30th anniversary in 2012).
  • At Walt Disney World and Disneyland, Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin is a ride that involves riding through a course of space monsters, etc. and firing at them to score points. The only spots that register a hit are the very conspicuously placed Zurg symbols on each target.
  • Even their solar farm◊ gets in on it.
• NASA's 2020 prototype lunar rover. It's a toss-up whether the American flag or the NASA logo wins.
• Historical totalitarian states loved this trope, inspiring its use in Dystopias everywhere:
  • The Nazis loved those hypnotic spinning swastikas so much they put them on just about everything the state had authority over. Even canned food.
    • And a forest; nobody seems to know precisely when it happened, or who was responsible, but someone planted a number of larch trees in the middle of a mostly-evergreen forest that formed a swastika when viewed from the air for a few weeks in autumn. The East German government either didn't notice or decided it wasn't worth the time and money to do anything about this, and it wasn't until the 1990s that the trees were cut down. And then grew back. The German government bulldozed the entire site the second time, to be sure.
    • And now another even larger one has been noticed in Kyrgyzstan, suspected to be the work of German POWs trolling their Soviet captors.
    • Near the end of the way, Hitler even had the titular trees on Unter den Linden removed and replaced by giant swastikas.
    • Post war, during what the U.S. miltary called "Denazification," the symbol was purged from most buildings. Some structures just had to remove a statue — ranging from some that were blown up, to just the emblem being carved out, as seen on this building◊. The Olympic Stadium has some remaining that could not be removed.
  • In the USSR (as well as other communist states) stars and hammer-and-sickle symbols were absolutely everywhere. And you'll still see them in present-day Russia. Post-communist authorities initially made a great effort to remove them all, then eventually got tired and gave up.
    • Helped by three facts: a) sometimes it was darn expensive to remove the sigils, and spending the already scarce funds on cosmetic changes when everything goes straight to hell is not the best thing to do, b) virtually every culture- or government-related structure had various related symbols absolutely everywhere, sometimes with every single decoration being filled with them, upping the cost spectacularly, and c) some of the sigils were just plain too awesome to remove (e.g. the stars on the Moscow Kremlin towers, made from ruby glass and fitted with a complex lighting system). Thus, the ones you will get to see are usually the grandest or the most artful examples of Sigil Spam.
• The Flying Windows screensaver.
  • The Windows key appears on every (non-Macintosh) keyboard since ~1995. This tends to make Linux users not very happy, or most Windows users, for that matter.
  • Likewise, many 1980s microcomputers — such as Commodore's, Apple's, and Atari's — had similarly branded keys with various functions. Apple eventually replaced theirs with a symbol that looks like a cloverleaf^note This was at the insistence of Steve Jobs, who felt that plastering the Apple logo everywhere was "taking it in vain".. Atari dropped their symbol key starting with the 1200XL (replacing it with an "Inverse" key).
  • Apple introduced their symbol keys on the ill-fated Apple /// in 1980; the //e had two Apple keys on either side of the space bar (an open Apple to the left and a closed Apple to the right). The original Apple Macintosh replaced the logo with the "cloverleaf" symbol (actually a "point of interest" symbol used to mark interesting locations in Swedish campgrounds) specifically to avert this trope: they didn't want the menus on the Macintosh to have Apple logos all over the place, reserving the Apple logo for the systemwide menu at the top left corner of the screen. The Apple symbol nevertheless reappeared on this key in the late 1980s, coexisting with the cloverleaf for well over the decade.
  • BlackBerry has a variant.
• In Indonesia, cigarette ads, smartphone brands, and political parties, to a downright absurd degree. In most streets, you literally cannot look around without spotting at least a half dozen ads of those.
• The government of American Samoa is actually required to put their official seal on nearly everything they own or make. This includes school buses, a memorial to an airshow accident, and doctor's notes from the government-run hospital.
• You can throw a rock in Mexico at random and odds are it will hit an eagle-eating-a-snake crest, or at the very least the stylized red-white-green eagle's head.
• Grant Morrison has referred to brands and logos (the McDonald's golden arches, Nike swoosh, Coca-Cola logo, etc.) as corporate viral sigils.
• In recent years, it's become fashionable for car manufacturers to work a tiny version of the corporate/division logo into places like the reflector just ahead of the headlight bulb (Mk5 Golfs and Jettas have a VW roundel in that exact spot, 2008-up Chevy Malibus have a bowtie there AND in the rear side reflectors...)
• The backdrops for a lot of press conferences can look this way.
• Part of the reason why S.P.Q.R. is considered the logo of The Roman Empire. They put it on absolutely everything they could get away with, from their legion's battle standards to storm drain manhole covers.
• The Pennsylvania Railroad, which at its height was the largest railroad in the world, put its keystone symbol over much of the northeastern parts of the USA. Not only did most engines, carriages, and wagons wear the Keystone, but the PRR also put its symbol on some of its bridges and all of its stations, some of which still stand.
  • The most lasting effect, however, is probably in the names of train stations: the main passenger rail terminals in New York City, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Newark are all named "Penn Station" (short for "Pennsylvania Station") after the railroad. Most—but not all—of these have the famous keystone in the architecture. (New York Penn Station in particular was completely demolished and rebuilt as a rather dingy, functional underground station in the late 1960s to make way for Madison Square Garden; while there are extensive proposals and plans surrounding Penn Station, it's not clear any would include the keystone. Certainly, the one plan that has come to fruition—replacing the old James Farley Post Office with the Moynihan Train Hall to serve Amtrak and Long Island Railroad trains—doesn't really have much in the way of nods to the old PRR.)
    • The railroad's main center in Philadelphia also bore the name, but eventually dropped it on account of how locals all came to call it 30th Street Station. Ironically, the difference is because PRR was based there: 30th Street Station was built to replace Broad Street Station, which had gotten too small for PRR's gigantic traffic but wasn't demolished until long after 30th Street became operational, so "Pennsylvania Station" would have been supremely useless as a name, as there were two of them barely a whole mile apart from each other.
  • The Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) was also notorious for doing this. It is justified because the railroad was originally a government plan to combine six bankrupt railroads (including Penn Central, the successor to both the PRR and its rival New York Central Railroad) all with separate attributes and systems of operation into one large, single, and uniform operation. Because of this, Conrail spent its first few years of operation modernizing its predecessors' property like signals, buildings, bridges, etc. Conrail's name, logo, and iconic blue and white color scheme is seen all over signs, buildings, and equipment and despite being bought out and disbanded in 1999, Conrail sigil is still seen today on various railroad property.
  • Most modern (20th century and newer) North American railroads with a discernible logo could be accused of this to some extent. Naturally, the larger ones do more of this than some 2-mile-one-locomotive shortline.
  • In Britain, the old British Rail symbol can still be found in most stations and is still used as a symbol for "railway station" on maps and road signs.
• A recent surge in nationalism made it so that most local clothing shops now have some form of garment that bears the three-stars-and-a-sun motif of the Philippine Flag. There is even a clothing line called exactly that that sells nothing but these garments.
• The Electronic Arts offices in Redwood City, California, are liberally covered in the company logo to the point where it verges on self-parody.
• Advertising in sports is no longer limited to Product Placement ads for everything from insurance to fast food. No, many teams are plastering their own social media (Twitter, Facebook) profiles out onto the field. In basketball, some even go so far as to put the team name or Twitter profiles on the top of the backboard, just so you can see it on an overhead shot. It's not just limited to home sites, either; neutral tournament courts do it too, as seen in this highlight reel from a 2014 ACC Tournament game.
• During the Olympic Games, the Olympic Rings are a very common sight, with the rings being plastered on the livery within the venues, on the playing surface and/or equipment of select sports, being on display at notable landmarks of the host city, and being constantly displayed as a graphic on numerous Olympic broadcasts.
• Some military units put their insignias everywhere.
  • In the US, the 1st Cavalry Division is famous for putting a yellow and black shield with a horse on it wherever they can.
  • United States Marines love their Eagle, Globe, and Anchor insignia. If one looks closely enough, it can even be found hidden in the camouflage pattern of their combat utility uniforms.
• The Pentagon is particularly fond of the pentagon motif, with everything from the floor decorations in the hallways, to its The Pentagram newspaper, to every instance of the letter O on PFPA equipment, to door signs on various offices. It's a wonder more...excitable conspiracy theorists haven't seized on this as evidence of the Pentagon being somehow occult-related.
• Done rather subtly by the House of Savoy: instead of spamming their red shield with a white cross they resolved to use the blue and azure colors with whom they had become associated with (as it was associated with the Virgin Mary, to whom they were and still are very devoted), with even their troops wearing dark blue uniforms (going double for the officers, as they would wear an azure sash). It was diffused enough that, after becoming a republic and exiled the House of Savoy, Italy still considers it a national symbol, using it in a subdued way for many things (including the blue sash for the military officers' dress uniforms)... And absolutely spamming it for sports events, where blue is the national color for everything except racing cars (where every nation has a color and France got to blue first).
• Also from Italy, it's easy to find a five-pointed white star (often with red borders), also known as the Star of Italy, on government-owned things and various patriotic art. It can be found on the Emblem of Italy (both current and the Kingdom's), as figurehead on any Italian Navy ship, as the rank insignia of all officer ranks in the Army and Carabinieri (they're distinguished by the number, color and disposition of the stars), and on the collar of all military personnel (the exception was Mussolini's Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, who, while military personnel, made their oath to the premier (that is, Mussolini himself) and wore fasces on the collar. With the fall of Fascism the first order they received was to replace the fasces with stars).
• Artists tend to place their artist's signature on their work, sometime hidden within the artwork.
• Devices including HDMI will have the HDMI logo in multiple places—on the box, in the documentation and on the device itself—because HDMI offers lower licensing fees for doing so.
• American universities offer just about anything you can imagined emblazoned with their logo.
  • Penn State is a particularly extreme example. In addition to the usual offerings available on-campus, several stores just across the street are devoted entirely to selling university merchandise. The Penn State logo is easily more common in State College than the American flag itself.
• In every major robot combat competition in which Team Toad participates, you can bet at least several of the competing robots will have a sticker with the Team Toad emblem on it, even if they have nothing to do with them. This is all in good fun though: Team Toad's leader, Michael "Fuzzy" Mauldin, will provide Team Toad stickers to everyone who wants to put one on their robots. At least five of them have been spotted at the same time in Robot Wars, for instance, including one on Matilda, a House Robot owned by the organizers.
• Graffiti taggers will leave their signature "tag" wherever they can, sometimes painted in elaborate multicolored letters as tall as they are.
  • The "Cool S" is an example of a commonly-graffitied symbol not tied to any particular artist.
• On a cruise ship, you'll get awfully used to seeing the logo/insignia of the cruise line wherever it can fit, from obvious things like the ships themselves through to things like doors, tableware, towels and bedding. The lines generally aim to communicate an air of grandeur and pride in their ships, which the sigil spam is a reinforcing part of.

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