1d ago

Ah yes, Because That Is What Makes a Good Logo

96 comments

I work in an industry that deals with customer logos almost exclusively. I now get at least one person a week bringing in garbage-tier art they made in Canva or whatever that isn’t made to any standard at all, so they have tons of thin lines, gradients, blurring, etc. Shocker, AI only thinks about making it visually appealing when it won’t translate to a one-color, doesn’t have PMS tones to base it on, no simplified version, etc.
People think making a logo is just that. Just the image itself. They don’t think past what’s in front of them.
- In my experience, most people have simply never thought about it before. If someone decides they want to open a bakery and they have never had a business before, they haven't thought about everywhere their new logo will be used unless they get that expertise from someone. I've gotten pretty good at explaining these concepts to people and they typically respect my expertise and take my advice, but not everyone 😆
  
  And that’s just it. In the past, you would have contacted a branding firm and paid someone with expertise to do all that for you. Now people think, “Why pay a branding firm when AI can do it in 5 minutes?”
- I would think AI art would be perfect for the use case of “here is the general gist of what I want, now turn it into something usable”. I can also imagine basically nobody actually using it that way correctly though lol.
- They don’t think past what’s in front of them.
  I'm pretty sure you just summarized the human paradigm.
- Devil's advocate: Another way to think of it is that as AI tools mature, we will see more tools make an impact the way template-based web builders transitioned us away from, at best, charmingly kitchy html business websites of '95-'05 that are horribly optimized and broken half the time towards standardized options that cover the basics with curated choices for clients to express themselves without hanging themselves. Yes, the template builders did homogenize business websites, but for all the businesses that weren't going to/couldn't pay for a serious web developer/designer anyway I'd rather go to their website and experience a bland predictable layout than experience my browser melting even though there may be a glimmer of creativity from the enthusiastic teenager they hired to build it from scratch (I was that teenager).
  We're all fixated on how AI could not do the work for the top 25% of clients who require high quality professional work. We forget that 75% of clients cheap out for DIY/scam/hack options when it comes to design, resulting in lots of crap in the ether. AI tools have huge potential for smoothing out the low-hanging fruit of basic pain points.
  
  The difference will be that AI doesn't understand the basics and can't curate choices to instead it will be a regression to wildly different and unoptimized web pages as each person wants to do their own spin on things instead of listening to experts.
  
  Well no, the AI doesn't do the curating, the company running the AI-powered platform does the curating. Neural Net AIs aren't built to understand anything. The company running the platform curates the training, prompt engineering, and non-AI structures (algorithms, rigid parameters, and basic rules) that hone the generative AI into maximizing the desirable kind of outputs and minimizing undesirable outputs for the specific field of tasks.
- tbh I prefer a logo with lots of colors and gradients, depth, lighting, etc. These ugly ass flat or outline logos have really ruined things
  
  Personal taste is totally fine, but what you're describing isn't a logo, it's an illustration. A good logo specifically must be simple so that it can be applied across a bunch of different contexts — print, digital, large, small. What if you wanted your logomark as a favicon? Depth and lighting would make it look like a smudge at that size. What about stitching your logo onto a hat?
  This is the main issue. Logos are part of a brand system, and generating a logo with AI circumvents all that thought. You get something that might look good, but your whole system becomes super fragile.
  Again, there's no disagreeing with personal taste, it's just a matter of thoughtful use of the system and medium.
  
  I feel that you're making the argument that we should compromise on the humanism of prominent and uniquitous pieces of art so that we can print t-shirts more cheaply. You can of course make the same argument about the building costs of modern boxy paneled apartments and office buildings, but that still doesn't make them any less unpleasant to look at.
  I feel that graphics designers (or really, brand managers), over the last 30 or so years, have made daily decisions about the cost effectiveness of something at the expense of beauty, and we now live in the most bland, generic, and tasteless era in modern history. What does a graphic designer even do anymore, besides copying other graphic designers?
  To be clear, AI is not the answer. But intuitively, a colored, shaded, 3 dimensional logo is more appealing to me than another flat, generic, 1 dimensional line illustration that says literally nothing about your brand identity.
  
  (Not the original guy that replied to you) I do agree about the blandness of many logos (god I hate flat design) and think the logo on the left is very bland, but the one on the right just does not work in many contexts. There's a middle ground where it works just fine, but with as much detail as in the AI gen logo it will look awful at small sizes. One is usable as a general purpose logo, the other isn't.
  
  Try embroidering your "logo with lots of colors and gradients, depth, lighting" on a polo shit and see how little of it actually translates. Or even a one color print job on a mailing. It will look like an unrecognizable hot garbage smudge.
  
  Not only will it look terrible it'll be significantly more expensive, each color and complication is going to add to the price. A simple logo with a clean silhouette is going to look nice and save money.
  
  It'll save money, I don't think it'll look nice
  
  If you hire a human designer there's a much higher likelihood of it looking good.
  
  That's really only suitable if the logo is going be displayed at a larger size on a screen. Many times logos will be displayed much smaller, such as when used as a favicon. When you cram too many details into a small space it just becomes noise. This also applies if people glance at the logo, since too much detail will make it difficult to work out what it is.
  Also as other people have mentioned. If you are going to be printing your logo, then you do need to have a design that uses just negative and positive space since it's easier to print and will look much cleaner.
  Additionally it's pretty common for organizations to have multiple versions of the logo as well. Usually a black and white one, a colored version of it, and versions with and without text. They could also have a more detailed version of the logo as well, but the other versions are more useful, so they may not even bother.
  
  You might just need two versions. The full colour one where the underlying medium supports it well, and a mono version for more restrictive media.

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