this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Fuck AI
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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.