this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
57 points (96.7% liked)
Fuck AI
2539 readers
444 users here now
"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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.
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.
I totally agree that more diversity in art makes things more interesting, and I'm a big fan of bucking trends to make things unique. Art should be able to exist on its own merit, as the artist intended, divorced from what would make a better t-shirt. Even stepping out of art and into design, it makes me sad how many cars are grey, black, or white. Let's get some variation!
But... This is a logo. It's not a poster. It's not a t-shirt or a building or a painting. It's a logo. As such, there are some specific criteria that will make it better at being a logo. It needs to be instantly recognizable. It needs to be legible across a wide variety of contexts, sizes, mediums, and color applications. As a result, logos tend to be better if they're simpler.
The AI output is an illustration because it uses things like shading, complex shapes, and shadows, etc... Can you use an illustration for a logo? By all means. In some situations, it'll probably look nice. But at a certain size, it just won't be recognizable, and then it won't be doing the main job you want a logo to do — be instantly recognizable across as wide a set of scenarios as possible.
Also, to be clear, I'm not a fan of the logo on the left either. It's not particularly imaginative, the highly variable line weight makes it feel in cohesive, and the details mean it probably wouldn't work well at small sizes either.