I Used an AI Image Generator to Draft Company Logo Concepts, and the Response Was Great
We’re a startup running without a designer, so our logo kept being a stopgap. Outsourcing it felt like an awkward budget call.
So I fed our brand keywords into Midjourney, generated twenty options, picked the best one, and ran a vote with the team—and the response was really good. We eventually had an outside designer polish the final version, but it drastically cut down the time to lock in a direction.
What I learned:
- Make sure to include these three in the prompt: 'simple,' 'no text,' and 'vector-style'—only then do you get something usable.
- It’s more efficient to use it for mood boards than to generate the logo itself.
- Always run a trademark search on the final result.
It’s not fully automated, but it seems useful enough for the early stages.
6 answers
Agreed. Those three prompts are pretty much the standard lol. Especially if you skip 'no text', you end up with a ton of garbled text.
Got a source? Where do you run trademark searches? The patent office site?
I tried something similar too. But instead of having it generate the logo itself, I only used it for a mood board and redrew the final version by hand. When you use AI output as is, there can be cases where things get ambiguous later with copyright or trademark issues. I think it's safer to use it just as a reference.
I work in branding, and we actually use this approach quite a lot. I used to spend hours digging through Pinterest looking for references, but now I can enter a few keywords and get three directions within 30 minutes. That said, a trademark search is absolutely essential, and if possible, I recommend having a patent attorney run one. We once had to scrap an entire concept because of a similar trademark. We tried to save money and ended up spending more.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Isn't it a bit risky to even hold a team vote on AI-generated concepts? The results look convincing enough that everyone goes, 'Oh, this is it,' but once you actually try to print them, Midjourney's signature gradients and noise make them unusable as a logo. I'll grant that it's meant for establishing direction, but we should also consider how that direction gets pulled along by AI bias.
I agree with the conclusion itself: it’s not fully automated, but it’s useful in the early stages. But if you keep using that 'early stage' as an excuse, quality ultimately won’t improve. At some point, humans need to get involved.