Can AI design my logo?

What is AI good at?

Making. It can generate a thousand logos before lunch, and some of them will be handsome. It is fast, tireless, and cheap, and I use it every day. It is the reason a brand can take me a week and not a month.

What can’t it do?

It cannot know you. It has never heard the thing your best client said about you. It doesn’t know which of those thousand marks is true and which is only attractive. A mirror is only useful if someone is standing there who knows what they are looking at.

It also cannot promise the mark is yours alone. Before you build a business on any logo, from AI or from a person, ask where it came from and talk to a trademark attorney.

Is this just the newest tool?

Yes. I started on Illustrator 1.0, which came on a floppy disk. After that came Photoshop, Quark, Flash, the first websites, WordPress, and Squarespace. Every few years a tool showed up that was going to end my career. I have been ended about seven times. I am doing fine.

Every one of those tools made the making faster. Not one of them ever told me what the thing should say. That was never a tools problem. Somebody has to stand outside your business and show you what is actually there.

So who should use an AI logo?

If you are testing an idea and haven’t made a dollar yet, a placeholder is reasonable. Use it, learn whether the business works, and don’t print five thousand of anything.

Once the business is real, the logo has a harder job. It has to be recognizably you, hold together across a website and a business card and a sign, and still be right in five years. That takes judgment and taste. Percona’s logo has outlived two of their websites, and it came from noticing that the whole company climbed mountains together. No prompt would have found that.

How do I use AI in my own work?

As a tool, happily. The questions, the diagnosis, and the decisions are mine. AI helps me build and refine what we decided, quickly, so your budget goes to thinking and not to hours of production.

AI works for you. You don’t work for AI. For most of my career, the people who could build fast had an advantage over the people who could see. That is over. The tools are finally in favor of people with taste.