AI is everywhere, in nearly everything: Facebook reels, YouTube videos, movies, and in design. Have you ever stopped to think deeply about what it's doing to the way we approach creative work? Understand, this is my opinion and many creatives I've talked with have similar opinions, but it's also based on what I've seen over the last few months.
AI is everywhere and graphic design was never going to be an exception
Unless you’ve been snoozing in a cave, you’ve seen a reel, an image, or something else where someone used generative AI to create it. At first it was new and exciting; a quick way to generate silly memes. The quality was awful and everyone could tell that it was computer generated — some were so bad that the lousy quality was the joke. But, like every technological marvel, AI’s capabilities grew by leaps and bounds.
Now, AI is everywhere. New businesses use it to save money on their logos and content creators use it to create bigfoot reels on YouTube. It’s in Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Suite, Word, and more, so the question of whether to use it becomes how do we use it wisely?
Designers Have Always Used Tools
If you want my opinion (and you must since you're here), it's a tool. Design and creative tools have been around for eons. Whether it was a new-fangled pencil that you could erase, a ballpoint pen, or clipart book, there have always been tools.
Look at it this way:
- Stock photography didn’t replace photographers, it created niche markets for specialized ones.
- Templates didn’t replace layout designers, they gave real designers inspiration and a new way to generate income.
- Photoshop didn’t replace artists, it created a whole new genre of art.
Can it replace your job? Maybe someday. I've seen some estimates floating around that it can currently replace the bottom 25% or so of creatives. If that's true, and I haven't seen any actual studies, it may mean that entry level designers and writers will struggle to get jobs and gain experience. To get it, they'll have to get creative. But it also means the rest of us need to up our game — so in some ways it may be healthy.
In my business, AI is the latest in a long line of tools I use to get my work done more quickly. It is never a replacement for my experience, thought processes, or skills.
So maybe the question now becomes how do we use AI to accelerate our creative process without losing our individuality?
The day logos started looking… the same
Have you noticed a trend toward sameness in visual design? Logos that look way too similar — and I don’t mean logos done by the same artist, every artist has a fingerprint, myself included. Just like every music composer has their favorite motif and every speaker has favorite metaphors.
I mean images where they look like someone cut them out of a clipart book and called them custom.
I don't know about you, but I’ve noticed an explosion of AI-generated logos. Where well-meaning people on a budget or in a rush used AI to create a logo to save money or time. Others may not have known they were getting an AI logo but they went with a “cheaper” designer who used generative AI and didn’t bother to tell them. Even if people who see the logo don't really know know, they may feel something "off" about it.
If you’re wondering how I know, think about all the times you've noticed that AI decides a human needs 7 fingers or shadows in weird places. But what's interesting about this isn't that AI gets anatomy wrong or does odd things with shadows because those issues get smaller with every passing month. No, what I think is really interesting is how often different AI models arrive at similar stylistic conclusions. The same mascot poses, the same dramatic gradients, and an all-too-familiar polished but generic look.
Now, I’m not here to bash AI — I’ve already said I use it. But I use it with discretion and an understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. My biggest problem with AI-created logos is that they all sort of look similar. It's like everybody suddenly found a new clipart book and started cutting and pasting from there.
If being different from your competitors matters in your business, understand this if nothing else: AI logos default toward sameness, which should make you uncomfortable. Take the time to ask yourself if a logo generated in seconds is really where you want to save money.
Yes, it's expensive, and yes, it's worth it. Can you really afford not to invest in your future?
What is a logo supposed to do for a business?
If you’re new to business or new to visual design in general, you may not see a logo as a big deal. After all, it’s just an image for business cards and as long as your business name is spelled right, it's fine. Right?
Wrong. In fact, you're so wrong that you're still sitting there in a cave when everyone else decided to walk outside into the bright spring sun. That’s where I come in and I’m going to be asking a few questions — because honestly? Giving out answers is boring. Socrates had it right.
The best logos are unique, distinctive, and emotive. They become shortcuts in our minds that we instantly recognize without needing to see the company name. It isn't magical woo-woo stuff, but the result of great design combined with consistency and repetition over time.
Take a moment and think about your favorite brands. Which ones are most memorable for their visuals (logo, colors, design)? Why? Can you identify them quickly because of their logo? If that recognition makes you stop and go, "oh yeah! I love that company's stuff," you've just seen how important a logo is.
Remember that people buy from brands and people they know, like, and trust. Wouldn't it be great if people said, "hey, I love their stuff" when they saw your logo?
Most are deceptively simple, but they also clearly demonstrate what the company offers or who they are, with very few exceptions. REI is a great example, with their mountain silhouette and initials embedded. Even if you didn't know what they sold, you'd think "outdoor company."
But here's the important thing: nobody confuses REI with Bass Pro or Cabela's, even though they're all outdoor brands. Their logo is at the core of their visual identity and makes that fact 100% clear at a moment's glance. It's that fine line between knowing the brand is an outdoor company without looking like every other outdoor company.
It's what makes really good logo design so expensive on the surface. The artist has to be able to boil a company's identity down to basically a stamp that is just as readable tiny as it is large. That may sound simple until you realize they're condensing years of experience, positioning, personality, and customer expectations into a single visual mark.
If we're all using the same tools, do we all get the same results?
The short answer, I think, is "maybe?" But I think it's more nuanced than that, and I wish more people asked that question. It's not always about quality, sometimes it's about sameness, or lack of individuality.
Generative AI is fed enormous amounts of existing work, then trained to predict the most likely thing a person might create. Branding often succeeds by doing the opposite. Memorable logos work because they carve out a unique place in the customer's mind and heart — not because they were statistically probable.
My issue with AI isn't in using it to aid the creative process. It's that when people use it to replace their creative process, the human part gets lost.
Anyhow, that leads up to my next question for you: if the goal of branding is differentiation in a crowded market, what happens when everyone uses the same starting point?
Can you take the risk of blending in to the crowd with a generic logo and a brand that never takes a clear position?
Where is AI's best use?
To figure that out, understand that AI's strengths are in the beginnings of the process and helping refine ideas, not in delivering a finished product. There has never been something I've run through AI that I thought...sure, that'll work. It's always...I can work with that or that's a good starting point.
They often have little things that make the viewer hesitate...just a little. The moment something feels slightly off is when you've introduced friction into the experience.
AI is a tool I use to rapidly create mood boards, explore concepts, and iterate from one version of an idea to the next. It also excels in helping my pick apart arguments and find holes in the logic. You can look at something or load it into Claude, Perplexity, or ChatGPT and have it analyze it for you, asking for all the weaknesses in it.
Keep in mind though, that AI is basically a sycophant. It will always tell you what it thinks you want to hear and inflate your ego. Which, if you're trying to improve an article or image, is exactly the opposite of what you want. AI is no replacement for a human's thoughts and feelings, but it's a really good tool in the creative process.
Human judgment still matters
No matter what AI generates for you, it's up to you to decide how much of it to use. A good designer is doing more than making a pretty picture. They're deciding what it communicates, whether that's trust, expertise, connection, luxury, affordability, or whatever a specific audience values. AI can't really do that. It can give you broad brush strokes, and even some details, but you still have to make the final decisions and be willing to own them.
When you're talking about logo design, your market tends to have a bigger say in whether it's good or it sucks than you. And while you have to at least like your logo, it must connect to your intended audience. It's got to mean something in some subconscious way or it's not going to land. It can, in fact, make you look like an amateur instead of a seasoned professional.
At the end of the day, knowing what not to do is at least as important as knowing what to do — then taking the appropriate action.
Questions you must ask before using an AI-generated logo
If you're really strapped and honestly don't have much choice, you may be feeling like an AI logo is your only option. I understand that feeling, so here's what I would do in your position: ask lots of questions of the logo, its appearance, and its purpose.
Does it matter if your AI-generated logo looks similar to others?
Maybe it seems a little out of character, after all my griping about individuality and brand distinctiveness, but it's important. Say you are going to use an AI logo, how important is it in your industry to be able to stand out? How much competition is there? If there's a lot of competition, you may want something more custom. If not, you may be able to get away with it for a while until you've had time to see how things go and then upgrade.
How much originality should a brand design or logo have?
Short answer: enough to be different than others in the same industry without being not of the industry.
I'll use healthcare as the example for the more complicated answer. Healthcare logos look like healthcare logos because of certain elements you see in them: red cross, people-centric imagery, stethoscopes, soothing blues and greens for certain sectors and bright reds for urgent and critical practices. So using some combination of those elements helps people identify it as a healthcare logo without having to think too hard into it. But each one has enough uniqueness that they're readily identifiable.
Is speed worth sacrificing brand distinction?
Even though AI can get it done quickly, the sacrifice may be your brand distinction. Are you really in that big of a rush or that broke that you can't spare a few days and a few hundred dollars on something nicer? Sure, logos can go all the way into the thousands, but there are also literally thousands of designers who will create a gorgeous logo with your input, adjusting it until you love it within a reasonable budget — I've seen rates that range from $250 to $1,000 or so. Many designers also include a brand guide to go with it so you can keep consistent when you hand off tasks to contractors with all the assets they'll need to do on-brand beautiful work for you.
Whether you use AI isn't the question anymore
AI isn't going anywhere and it can help us get somewhere a bit faster. But branding was never about getting there fast — although fast is nice — it was about how you stood out once you got there. If more businesses rely on the same AI engines, using the same datasets, with the same prompts, what happens to differentiation? Do we end up with more creativity, or more conformity? And more importantly, which one do we value more...and why?
I don't think AI is the problem. Used well, it is one of the most powerful tools we've ever had. But the question is whether we're using it to expand our thinking or replace it.
That's a conversation worth having.
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