Whether you are at the beginning of your business journey or hitting a point where you are ready to level up your brand, one of the first things you may think of is what you have as your company logo.
Even though your logo should be part of your business’s wider branding strategy, it’s probably the most important visual part of everything you will do. Your logo says a lot about you and your business. You’ll use it on your website, social channels and marketing, and more than likely look at it every day. But, if you’re looking for a new logo or updating your existing one, should you use AI to create it for you?
The use of AI in day-to-day life over the last few years has become second nature for some, so I fully appreciate why someone would think it was the best tool to use when you need a logo. However, it has some limitations which people probably don’t think about when they decide to use it.
You lose your brand’s personality
Your business is personal to you. You may provide a service or product which is done by others, but ultimately your business is you. Creating a logo through AI can stop your personality shining through your brand.
AI doesn’t understand your unique story and where your business is going, so unless you can really explain your story and what you’d like in only a few paragraphs, your logo wouldn’t be very ‘you’. And remember, you’d have to look at this logo every day, so you’d want to see something you were really passionate about that gives off the right impression to your customers.
There’s more to a brand than a logo
When creating a logo, there’s a lot more strategy that happens behind a brand before you get to the fun part. We’ve created multiple brands for businesses and before we get started on the design we always have a strategy session to fully understand the person and their business before coming up with ideas for their logo.
You also get an ongoing relationship with an agency which you wouldn’t get with AI. If you need to develop your brand further or look at complimenting marketing, it’s worth going to someone who has had history with your brand and has a larger understanding.
It may not be very original
AI is always learning and using information from various sources across the internet. What AI creates for you may not be as original as you might think. For example, if you are creating a logo for an accountancy firm, AI might look at other accountancy firms and their logos to see what that logo should look like, then use these as inspiration for yours.
This could cause some issues further down the line with copyright as you can’t 100% guarantee that the logo hasn’t copied someone else’s design. Currently in the UK, copyrighting AI generated content is being disputed, and in the US, images fully created by AI cannot be copyrighted by law.
We’ve had experience with this issue at Big Reputation. We had to create a new logo for a client who had created their logo using AI. They had another company contact them and were told they owned the trademark, so had to stop using their brand. They had no legal leg to stand on so we had to create a brand new logo for them.
Ultimately, if you wanted to copyright your brand in the future but it’s been made by AI, you may come across some obstacles and you may not be able to do so. If you’ve already used this logo everywhere, such as on printed material etc, you may even have to start again, causing additional costs. If you use an AI logo generated, you may want to take a close look at their terms and conditions.
It’s never ‘perfect’ and can be limiting
I always find when I come across a logo created by AI, there’s something not quite right about it. It might be the outline of words is slightly wobbly, or shapes don’t match up perfectly. As a Graphic Designer, I look out for things like this, but you may not notice it until you want to make it really big and put it on the side of a van (we’ll come back to this!).
My biggest issue with AI created logos is how limiting they can be. Currently, an AI created logo will only ever be a .jpeg or a .png. This can be really restricting when it comes to large format printing, embroidering uniforms, vehicle wrapping etc. When you go to a reputable agency or graphic designer, you’ll receive a logo in all the formats you need, so if you decided to make a 30ft banner of just your logo, you’ll be able to without it pixelating and looking rubbish.
However, AI logos can’t do this. You would more than likely have to have it recreated by someone else to make it work for what you need, or pay to have it digitised (possibly by every business you need to take it to unless you paid for the files).
If you think you’ll ever need to embroider your logo, or add it onto a banner, I’d recommend not using AI.
It’s not all bad, but be careful
AI isn’t all bad for your business branding. Some businesses may not have the budget for a full brand overhaul, so AI might be a great place to start to get inspiration. However, you shouldn’t fully rely on it to create your logo for you.
You wouldn’t get the full personal experience you would get with a human being (whether it be a freelancer or an agency), but most importantly you wouldn’t own the copyright to your own brand, which can be a bigger issue in the long run.
At Big Reputation, we don’t just make you a nice logo, we provide a branding strategy session to fully understand you and your business. Then we get to the fun part of creating a brand and logo for your business that makes you really stand out and works for you.
We will also help you trademark your brand, so you know you’ll be protected in the future and never need to worry about copyright concerns.
If you’d like to discuss your brand or find out more about a brand strategy, we can help.