Recently, I noticed a service logojoy that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to develop logos via an online algorithm. The idea is that a client will type in the coordinates starting with the name of their business, and continue with favored color palettes and effects to gather an endless stream of results. Yes, AI is moving into the graphic design field, and I admit that I was annoyed that yet another piece of the design pie was being eaten.
It’s nice to think of AI in terms of self-driving cars, which will save tens of thousand of lives every year. But the downside is that they will also eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs as well. Not much we can do other than to figure out how to ease the burden on truck, bus, and taxi drivers and find more positive ways for everyone to keep moving forward with their lives. It’s the same with graphic design, except for one major difference—we generally get paid to think, not to decorate.
Designers go through every trick, or “technique” in the book when fleshing out a logo exploration; things like reversals, textures, etc., so I must admit that the idea of our creative method being revealed and exposed is disconcerting. But here’s the rub—you can’t get people to properly coordinate their business’s collateral without a logo, and you can’t evolve a proper logo without something to work from. In other words, clients and fellow graphic designers can use the service to flesh out an exploration.
A visual identity can simply take a form, and there are plenty of terrible logos out there. But what makes them terrible is how empty they are of meaning. As my mentor, Charles Goslin, used to say, “Even a monkey can make something look good; but a monkey can never think of the idea.”
