The company logo is the heart of your brand building efforts. It is as important as having high quality products, or having your customers promote your products. The logo helps to create a positive association in the minds of your audience, with your company, and strengthens brand loyalty.
illustration by Berin Holy
Logos are important, firstly, because they grab attention. You only have a couple of seconds to catch the attention of a potential customer and get them to consider using your product. In those few seconds, it’s not your product’s quality that wins the day, it’s your logo. Having a great logo helps your brand stand out and win attention. It’s not surprising that some of the greatest logos of all time are also logos that belong to some of the greatest companies of all time. Designed well, a logo is the first step toward converting a potential customer into an actual customer. Designed badly and it can put off a customer for a long time. Your logo is the heart of your brand’s identity, it is the foundation of the story that the company seeks to tell its audience. Having said all that, many people are tempted by the idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) based logo design tools.
AI is an umbrella term that describes technologies that use huge volumes of data to uncover patterns, make predictions, and use their insights to act autonomously in a wide range of areas, from playing chess to making logos. An AI-based logo design tool simplifies the design process, allowing people with even zero experience of logo design, to design their own logos. It is a credible option for small businesses who often cannot afford to employ a professional logo designer. Many AI-based logo design tools have freemium options that allow users to try the tools without having to pay a subscription before charging very small fees for their creations. Customization is extremely simple, using features that Windows users will immediately get, such as drag and drop. Changing fonts, colours, and other parameters is very simple.
Obviously it helps if you know something about design, and are creative, because you can use the tools to the limit of their abilities. As easy as the tools are, you still need to understand what colours work best with your demographic to communicate the message that you are trying to communicate. You need to understand the psychology of your customers and branding principles so that you can turn the potential of AI-based logo design tools to your advantage. Even though the hard running is left to the algorithm behind the tool, you still need to actually understand the principles of marketing and design to get things right.
A potential downfall of using AI based logo design tools is that AI does not explain itself. It simply does the task assigned to it. That poses a problem when it comes time to explain why the brand was chosen and tends to dehumanize the narrative. It’s important to understand the decisions that went into designing a logo so that you can explain them to the world and even defend the decisions if necessary. Logo designs for business are too important for nobody in the company to understand why the logo is the way it is.
A professional logo designer may prove a better option for the reasons stated above. AI can do many things much better than a human being can, but it is still very unlikely that AI will ever be able to match human creativity, because of the nature of AI’s neural networks, its inability to distinguish between valuable and non-valuable patterns, and because AI cannot think outside of a dataset. Human creativity is the one area where human intelligence still excels far beyond that of AI.
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