AI-Assisted Logo Design Experiment

I have started playing with AI drawing tools using PlaygroundAI.com. There’s a lot to learn about how to use it effectively and it’s been fun to experiment. As a logo designer I decided to see how it would do if I asked it to design a logo for me. One of my strange passions is watching documentaries about cults (or if you prefer a less incendiary term, high-demand, self-improvement groups). Having just finished watching HBO’s “The Vow,” I decided to ask it to help me design a logo for a cult.

My normal design process involves doing a bunch of research before I begin drawing. I collect lots of examples of similar logos or graphics that have something tangentially related to the company I’m working for. I love to find unusual ways people have drawn the letters in the initials to see if I can find inspiration. Then I start to experiment with quick sketches to find a concept. This time I decided to do something different. I asked Stable Diffusions to present the concepts to me, and then I would redraw one of those concepts into a usable logo.

I plugged in words like: creepy, Scientology, snake, octopus, religion, and logo. These are some of the renderings the AI produced for me.

I decided that I could do the most with this concept. I liked the the more simple shape and the lack of details. I also liked the way it looked like octopus arms reaching into your soul, but not overtly because no cult would just come out and say it like that.

Next I drew the logo in Adobe Illustrator. I made the image symmetrical and tried to make the transitions between the different loops more natural and consistent.

Next, I put the logo into Adobe Photoshop and added some gradients and lighting effects. You can see the final product here with the original concept. I might play with it a little bit more in the future, but for an experiment in my free time I’m satisfied with the result. I don’t know if I’ll use this method in the future for actual client work, but the beauty of AI is how quickly it can produce images. It doesn’t feel like a massive waste of time if the images don’t work. I’ve put hours of work into concepts only to learn they weren’t going to work, so there’s some great benefit in having concepts quickly created that I don’t feel committed to. You can see more of my logos in my portfolio.