Thursday, June 27th 2024
By now, we’re more than familiarized with the AI boom that took over social media in the past few months, with everyone gladly sharing their data and personal image with random servers online for free at the promise of receiving personalized illustrations of themselves made by an algorithm. And that’s fine, let’s say it’s just pure, “safe” internet fun, right? Well, as designers and creatives, we also had to look into another road AI is traveling through, one that is very close to home: branding.
Remember when you had to get in touch with a graphic designer or a design studio or even a marketing agency in order to develop a full branding strategy for your brand? Well, you still have to, but the internet is offering quick-fixes for people that don’t really care about a full branding package and they just need a logo for their company and they want it fast (and cheap). Some say that websites like https://brandmark.io/ are taking designers out of business, and even though we know that’s not true, we had to make sure what the fuss was all about.
"The thing is these tools need to be seen as exactly that, tools."
We took upon ourselves the task of using these tools as facilitators instead of enemies and we wanted to put the AI to the test: how good they really are? For this purpose, we selected three well-known brands as subjects and our goal was to try to recreate the famous logos of each brand using AI through keywords, categories and the basic edits said sites allow us to use.
Overall, they offer pretty basic results with very limited personalization, and you basically get a variety of similar results with little tweaks and differences here and there, but it’s obvious they work with a handful of templates and free typographies in order to satisfy the very basic needs of those that use these sites instead of reaching out to an actual designer. Yes, you can have a logo in a matter of minutes, but it’s like getting a tattoo from a catalog instead of getting a personalized design for yourself from a tattoo artist. The final result has no soul and it’s a generic, waterdown version of the work real designers do on a daily basis. AI is here and it’s going to continue to evolve and be perfectioned. The thing is these tools need to be seen as exactly that, tools at the disposal of designers, not as replacement of human work cause AI can be good, but they lack common sense and POV last time we checked.
For this creative exercise, we took the logos of a few well-known brands like Coca-Cola, Apple and McDonald’s and we tried to recreate them in the most accurate way possible, using the AI programs and adding keywords related to each brand, as a way to get the programs to recreate the actual logos of the brands as we know them, and these were the results:
If you ever saw Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968), it depicts a very clear example of how tools can evolve to the point of the roles being shifted. This is a sci-fi movie filled with fantasy, fictional, obscure elements but the premise can be contrasted to this topic: man creates tool, man’s tool transforms into “man” while man transforms into “tool”, “man” destroys “tool”, “tool” destroys “man” with tool. Right now we’re in an incertitude stage, where we don’t really know if AI can get out of control and basically replace human work, evolving from being just a tool or a means to an end, even when it comes to graphic design. And the truth is only time can tell how good or smart AI can be, or how much of an AI it is when it’s all being programmed with algorithms coded by humans, following steps and variants in a guided process. Is it really smart or is it just following commands in binary code? Can AI have a soul? Can a soul be programmed? Are we close to cracking that code? We’ll have to just wait and see.
