One of our main offerings at VSSL is branding. That could include just visual identity or everything that goes into building a brand: naming, positioning, tone of voice, visual identity, product design, values, and everything in between. Even if we aren’t creating everything, we are always thinking about how all of the pieces fit together because that is how you maximize your ROI on every individual piece.
That said, it is really common for new companies or products to think narrowly about branding as just a logo and some colors. If that’s how someone views a brand, it’s easy to oversimplify what goes into creating some of the best brand systems in the world, not to mention the potential of their impact. That narrow thinking also lacks an understanding of the effort and cost to produce something of quality.
So I wanted to perform an experiment.
There are so many methods to get a quick logo, the most common of which are AI generators and online freelance marketplaces. You can get a logo for as little as $20. But what do you actually get? And could I do any better? I wanted to find out.
I decided to test several AI tools and purchase one from the best one I could find. Then I would experiment with a top-rated designer on Fiverr. And finally, I would take a shot at a logo.
A couple of ground rules:
- To eliminate my own bias, I would not write the brief. I would use Chat-GPT to generate a brief that all 3 participants would use.
- I would seek out the very best options for the AI and Fiverr-generated logos and iterate until I got the logo as good as I could.
- I would ensure that my design was not similar or derivative of any of the design elements from the other two logos (this proved easier than I thought).
The Brief
As I mentioned, I had Chat-GPT create a brief so that I didn’t have any sort of advantage or bias. The only choice I made is that the company we are branding would be a SaaS tech company because that is the majority of our clients at VSSL.
Here is the correspondence I had with Chat-GPT and the brief it generated
First up: AI
I started googling and checking Reddit to find recommendations for the best tools. The pricing seemed pretty consistent, and luckily, most let you try it for free and then buy something if you like it.
After experimenting with about 10 different tools, I felt like the best results were from Logopony where you can get an AI-generated logo for $20.
It’s a simple 4-step process where the user can choose logos they like from a list, identify relevant icons, select colors, and input the name and slogan (if applicable). Because I couldn’t input the actual brief, I used as much of what was in it as I could to answer the different questions.
It’s a really simple process—maybe too simple. You get an endless scroll of options with a lot of similar typography and iconography. Some of it feels like it took your direction into account, and some of it feels overwhelmingly random.
After looking through pages of options, I chose the option below. I thought the typography was the least egregious and the mark was interesting. It wasn’t too literal and conveyed the idea of a flowing connection nicely.
After some edits to color, scale, and positioning, I arrived here. The process took about an hour overall. Important to note: this file type and resolution are not at all universal. This is not something I could use at small sizes and would not be the most desirable format for web or digital display. It is not editable at all. I pretty much just got what I got.
Second: Fiverr
To find my designer on Fiverr, I searched for some simple keywords and looked for a person with a lot of very high reviews. Ultimately, I settled on someone using words like modern, minimalist, and professional to describe their logo design services, which seemed in keeping with the brief. The chosen designer had 5,209 reviews and a 4.9-star rating, so that felt promising. They were charging $25, which included one round of changes.
After initiating the project, I was able to upload a lot more information than the AI approach, including the full brief. The designer was really responsive and got me a first draft in 4 days. Below are the first two options.
I was torn, but ultimately, I felt that the second option’s fluidity was more on-brief. The first felt a little too symmetrical and static.
For my single round of changes, I asked them to use the typeface from option 1 and see if there was a way to focus on technology a little more so it was clear this was an enterprise technology company.
They provided these 3 versions and that was my last round of changes. I chose the middle one.
Below are the final files I was provided with. Although they had better resolution than what I got with AI, none of them are editable or ideal for screens.
Third: My Turn
To even the playing field, I didn’t want to spend days on this. I wanted this to be a down-and-dirty design sprint to eliminate hours spent as a huge variable. As a result, I went with my very first idea and just made it work. Lastly, I went directly from the brief taking its guidance on color and iconography very literally. Here is where I landed after about 4-5 hours from idea to final design.
The first thing to notice is that it’s not just a logo design. It’s the beginning of a system. That’s because a logo is just one small piece of a visual identity system and seeing glimpses of a system is the only way to truly understand if a logo works. At VSSL, if we are just designing a logo and nothing more, we always design it with the awareness that color, typography, texture, photography, iconography, and other design elements impact how the logo is viewed and experienced.
Love or hate the result, I feel confident saying that it nails the brief and contains a lot more thought than the AI or Fiverr logos. The mark itself has all of the symbolism and movement from the brief built into it: a cloud, connecting nodes, and flowing data streams. The shape of it also creates upward movement to convey a sense of growth. The typography is friendly, contemporary, and geometric with ink traps that complement the negative space of the logo mark. The color palette is high contrast and directly correlates to what is in the brief. The background texture relates to the flowing data streams and ease of the product. Photography of casual users gives it the appearance of appealing to the masses and accessibility.
It’s not earth-shattering, but it is perfectly professional and what investors and prospective customers would expect from an easy-to-use SaaS tool. There are things I would love to refine and develop further, but for a quick sprint, I think this accomplished what I wanted.
My Takeaway
I’m not going to say that no one should ever use AI or Fiverr to generate a logo (even if I do think that) because it would be undeniably biased. I will say that if you go those routes, what you get will be very generic, forgettable, and limited.
Even if you get a logo that you like, that is just one tool in the brand toolbox. You won’t have any guidance on color, typography, texture, photography, iconography, and other design elements, which are all critical pieces to getting your product out there. A brand is an ecosystem and it doesn’t make sense to only build out one piece of it or reverse-engineer the other stuff later. Building it all together ensures you go to market with something that people understand. It also establishes the credibility needed to instill a sense of confidence in investors or potential customers.
Lastly, I think consumers will start to recognize the hallmarks of AI-generated logos. I saw very similar typefaces and design elements used heavily across all of the AI platforms, which I recognized from shoddy logos in the market right now. The more we use AI as the solution for building a logo or a brand, not just a tool as part of the process, the more the general public will be desensitized to and put off by the output.
If you’re ready to build your brand the right way, reach out today and let’s get started.