A logo is more than just a pretty picture. It’s literally the first thing that customers see about your brand. What’s more is that it’s pretty much the most memorable thing. Just like the image of a partially bitten apple immediately reminds you of Apple Inc. products, your logo is what quickly reminds consumers about your brand. A well-designed logo can also instantly convey your brand’s personality and quality.
Designing a logo isn’t just a matter of picking fancy colors, fonts, and slapping different vector images together. It’s a complex process that needs careful thought. You need to carefully think about your brand’s values, your target audience, and what message you hope to pass across.
A tardy logo easily sends a message that your brand isn’t worth the consideration. But an effective logo speaks quality.
Note that an effective logo could either be simplified or heavily stylized. What matters is that it sends the right message to your target audience.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the past and future of logo design. We’ll also explore the rise of tools such as AI logo generators and see how it can impact a designer’s creative process as well as the effectiveness of the logo that it created.
The Evolution of Logo Design
Designing a logo took a lot of time and effort in the past. A lot of research, sketching, and fine-tuning had to be done before a logo could be created.
It still follows the same process these days, only that the design tools are better and faster. Back in the day, designers would spend time with pencil on paper, and they often created large and heavily stylized logos.
These heavily stylized logos were designed to stand out on signposts that could be read from afar and were even noticeable in poor lighting. Most of them were drawn by hand until the advent of technology.
With digital tools, logo design began to evolve in simplicity. A new form of beauty in simplicity took over the design world such that logos grew more minimalist and abstract. Looking at the logo history of brands like Apple, Google, Starbucks, and even Disney, shows that simplicity has taken over.
Despite the flair for simplicity, the process of brainstorming, research, sketching, and fine-tuning still prevailed. The average logo designer still has a sketchbook of logo ideas that kept getting refined until the final choice.
The logo design process has become faster and simpler as well. This is due to the rise of digital design software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and BrandCrowd. You can even edit even if you only have a phone with the various mobile editing apps available.
The Need For AI Logo Design
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No doubt, digital logo design tools are individually amazing.
Softwares like Adobe Illustrator offer a range of professional features that make the design process smooth.
Meanwhile, our beginner-friendly logo maker tool at BrandCrowd is aimed at a wider audience of small self-starting brands that cannot afford the premium rates of design softwares and professional logo designers.
This way, both the big and small brands get to create amazing logos to preach their brand message.
But then, the digital era has taken another leap forward – AI.
Recently, AI softwares have taken the world by storm, allowing literally anyone to create amazing content with just a few text prompts.
New brands have emerged, creating a niche market that offers AI logo design generating softwares. Users can easily type in a detailed description of their logo idea or brand’s service, and the AI generator would create different logo samples. Some AI softwares even allow users to upload a logo sketch, which would then be fine-tuned by the software to look professional and presentable.
There are even AI website builders that new brands can use.
Expanding The Logo Design Frontier With AI
Thanks to AI, many more people (personal or business), can now design logos without the usual stress. The days of unending sketches and research is quickly fading away as AI logo design is taking over.
Even professional logo designers have started adapting AI tools into their design process.
Enterprise software providers like Adobe now have their own premium AI design software called Adobe Firefly. Microsoft also has Microsoft Designer, which while focusing on image generation, can also provide logo images.
There are even more logo-centric AI design softwares and platforms like Design.com, Looka, and Brandmark.io that offer both free and paid services.
With AI, logo design has become more accessible. But that’s not all.
Crowdsourcing: Why AI Works
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Looking at the average logo design process, there’s a need for research and brand analysis. The market research coupled with brand analysis helps to streamline design factors such as ideal color choices, fonts, and characters. Typically, the market research takes time, since a lot of questions on consumer behavior and preferences need to be answered.
With AI logo design generators, this tedious process takes a backseat. Most AI generators are trained with billions of market and design data. With this data, they can easily create logos that perfectly align with market preferences.
The process of AI using market data to design logos is similar to the marketing strategy known as crowdsourcing.
Crowdsourcing is a marketing strategy that involves gathering ideas from an existing audience. Campaigns such as online surveys, questionnaires, contests, micro-tasks, and social media challenges, can be used to gather market insights for brands.
Through crowdsourcing campaigns, brands also get to make decisions on their logo designs. For instance, a brand could carry out a “choice” campaign on its social media channels by asking its followers to choose between two or three logo options. With this, followers can make comments on their preferred logo options, which would be helpful in brand development.
Thanks to crowdsourcing campaigns, brands can also build a presence in the minds of their followers who would likely convert to paying customers.
But then, most crowdsourcing campaigns are organic. Basically, they are better planned and executed with the human touch. This is due to a noticeable flaw in most AI designs – commonness.
Crowdsourcing With AI
Seeing as AI design tools create thousands of different brand logos based on the exact same market data, the designs tend to look alike. This becomes a problem since the primary goal of a brand identity is to establish uniqueness.
As such, brands can’t just stay fixed on designing logos with AI generators. Instead, brands can combine a couple of AI tools for designing and crowdsourcing.
AI tools like ChatGPT can be used to generate content ideas for crowdsourcing campaigns. The feedback from crowdsourcing can then be used to properly prompt AI logo design generators. This way, the results would be more unique compared to just allowing the AI design software to create something generic.
Conclusion
In the end, the best way to create a logo is to combine AI with organic crowdsourcing campaigns. The beauty of crowdsourcing and AI is that they’re both accessible. There are free and also affordable AI design and marketing tools online that brands can use. In the same vein, crowdsourcing really is a matter of engaging your existing audience, which costs nothing.
With the vast differences in the editing process and the tools used between the past and today, one thing remains the same. It’s that what matters the most when creating your logo is putting in the work to ensure that your brand registers a presence in the minds of potential customers.
With technology, this is made easy. People can access various design software and tools that offer customizable templates so you don’t have to start from scratch. AI design tools are also available to even shorten the process by providing you with finished images in a snap.
But if you’re still skeptical with AI, you can go with trusted high-quality human designers to create your unique brand identity instead. You can tap into our creative community here in DesignCrowd and hire a designer now.
What are your thoughts about AI? Do you like AI designs or do you prefer human-made designs? Let us know in the comments!
Written by DesignCrowd on Monday, September 30, 2024
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.