The Era of AI Logo Design: Midjourney vs Designers

A design challenge face-off — who makes better logos?

Okay, so it’s no secret that I don’t enjoy visual design work. Compared with all other aspects of design, visual design is my forgotten child (sorry).

Them: Hey I need help with a logo, do you have some ti-

Me:

Don’t get me wrong — as a designer, it’s definitely important to have an eye for what looks visually appealing and understand the principles of what makes for good visual design. But picture this: you’re a UX designer, juggling a gazillion tasks, and visual design is like that elusive unicorn that takes forever for you to catch.

And I’m always looking for ways to work smarter, not harder. So when Midjourney came up it was a shining beacon of 🙌 hope 🙌. But I wasn’t sure if I could farm off all my future visual design work to it just yet.

So we formed a team to put Midjourney to the test through a design challenge: The ultimate logo design face-off.

👯‍♀️ The Team:

1. Zhi Ying: A visual design wizard
2. Alvin: A Midjourney enthusiast
3. Shaina: Me, someone more clueless about Midjourney than you are

✏️ The Brief: Design a logo for an annual Govtech conference — Stack Developer Conference

Before diving into the experiment, we had to set some ground rules. We asked ourselves:

1. Can Midjourney help us produce higher quality designs?
2. Can it supercharge our speed?
3. And as a bonus, can it push our creative boundaries, inspiring us with novel ideas?

Bear in mind that we’re assessing it specifically for logo design so these same criteria may not apply to other use cases for Midjourney like generating art posters and illustrations.

The Challenge

📍Challenge 1: Create a logo from scratch

Our aim was to evaluate Midjourney’s capability to entirely replace human designers as a tool that covers the entire logo design process — both the creative and technical aspects of logo creation.

📍Challenge 2: Digitalise a logo

Now this was to see if Midjourney could come in to support people who already have a clear vision of their desired logo, but lack the necessary skills to bring their ideas to life digitally. (Be the hands for people like me, basically.)

📍Challenge 3: Improve an existing logo

Finally, we wanted to see if Midjourney could step in as a brainstorming buddy for designers looking to bounce off ideas and enhance their existing logo designs.

But first, what makes a good logo

Before going into the challenge, we needed to establish a set of metrics to evaluate the logos. We made a reference to Smashing magazine’s article on “Vital Tips For Effective Logo Design”.

A good logo is…

1. 🖍️ Simple: It should be easy to understand and visually uncomplicated.
2. 🧠 Memorable: It should have distinctive features that represent the brand’s personality or values.
3. ⏱️ Timeless: It should remain relevant. It avoids trends or design elements that might become outdated quickly by focusing on fundamental design principles.
4. 🧩 Versatile: It should work well in different sizes, mediums and color variations without losing its impact or legibility.
5. ✌️Appropriate: It should communicate the nature and values of the brand by understanding the target audience and the industry.

Creating our own logos to set a baseline

Before diving into the logo design challenge, we needed to establish a foundation against which we could compare and measure the performance of Midjourney.

• About the brand: The Stack Conference is Singapore’s largest Government-led developers conference connecting Government, industry and the tech community to share insights on new tech trends and innovations from key industry experts.

To us, the brand was about bringing People 🙋‍♀️ together to share Ideas💡, and form Connections 💬

So those were the key concepts we wanted to play around with and showcase through our logo.

After dedicating an entire day to this creative process, we carefully reviewed and shortlisted our favorite logos:

Now to evaluate our designs

🖍️ Simple: 4/5
The logos keep things sleek and clean with little complexity involved

🧠 Memorable: 2/5
While visually appealing, they didn’t quite hit the mark on uniqueness

⏱️ Timeless: 2/5
The font choices for many of the logos were using typefaces balance trendier tech fonts with timeless sans serif fonts

🧩 Versatile: 4/5
The logos are not complex and can scale well and some elements can even be picked out to spin off collaterals without using the whole logo

✌️ Appropriate: 4/5
The logos are in line with the brand story and play with the concept of technology stacks

✨ Total score — 16/25

Thoughts on our own logos

• The good 😊
  These drafts showed promise and provided a solid starting point. But they needed some polishing. Adding a touch of playfulness, such as visually engaging elements or clever letter combinations, could amp up their appeal.
• The meh 😕
  We’ll be honest — the boundaries of our imagination held us back a bit. Despite two rounds of iterations, we found it challenging to break free from familiar logo concepts.

Now, moving on to the experiment!

Challenge 1: Create a logo from scratch

👾 Midjourney Tool: /Imagine

To create a logo from scratch, all we needed were some ideas for prompts to use. Prompt generation is its own ballgame and it’s a rabbit hole we won’t dive into for now, but you can check out some great resources on how to generate good prompts with prompt guides and prompt builders.

But if you’re lazy (or smart), you can outsource that to ChatGPT and just tweak the parameters accordingly.

Logos generated

The result? Well, let’s just say it was a mixed bag of emotions.

🖍️ Simple: 3/5
Most logos achieved simplicity, except for the overly complex robot logo (but it gets points for being cute)

🧠 Memorable: 3/5
The face logo stood out as unique and memorable, while others lacked memorability, especially since one looked like the Google Chrome logo. But the robot could be quite memorable as a mascot

⏱️ Timeless: 2/5
The face one could be timeless, but the rest felt a bit too stylised and trendy

🧩 Versatile: 2/5
The robot was too complex to be adapted into different formats while the rest had too many colours, which would render them ineffective in greyscale

✌️ Appropriate: 4/5
Robot and AI man are quite appropriate for the theme of tech, but the rest were too generic

✨ Total score — 14/25

Thoughts on Challenge 1: Was Midjourney better at creating a logo from scratch?

• Were they of higher quality? We wouldn’t exactly say so. The forms were a bit too complex for a logo. And that’s us already ignoring the wonky text, but we’ll close an eye there because Midjourney is notoriously bad at handling text.
• Was it faster? Midjourney is unquestionably faster at generating an image at the snap of a finger. But the outcomes are only as good as their prompt. Crafting a well-structured and compelling prompt is an art in itself to effectively communicate the intended vision to Midjourney.
• Did it inspire us? Nah. The logos looked too familiar, as if someone just plucked them from the depths of a generic stock image library.

Challenge 2: Digitalise a logo

👾 Midjourney Tool: /Imagine + Image upload

Now to see if Midjourney could transform hand-drawn concepts into usable digital logos. To do this, we started out by creating a sketch of our idea.

Our sketch:

The idea was to combine the letters “S” and “C” (for Stack Conference) and interlock the layers together to represent the idea of a stack

With these ideas in mind, we crafted prompts to guide Midjourney in translating our sketches into digital designs

✏️ Prompt 1: Create an isometric logomark

✏️ Prompt 2: Create a flat version of the logomark

Then we went into Midjourney to attach our sketch + the prompt.

Logos generated

Honestly, not bad! With some iterations, they turned out pretty cool!

🖍️ Simple: 2/5
Parts of the generated images could be extracted to be used as logomarks, but they still needed to be simpler. Also, 3 out of 4 of the images above had multi-colour gradients, which made it too visually complex

🧠 Memorable: 3/5
The logos lacked a strong concept or story, and some were too intricate to be easily memorable

⏱️ Timeless: 2/5
The logos leaned toward trendy design elements with the inclusion of gradients and floating elements, which may not stand the test of time

🧩 Versatile: 1/5
The complexity of gradients and intricate details in the logos limited their versatility. They might not translate well in greyscale or small sizes

✌️ Appropriate: 3/5
The logos generally aligned with the Stack Conference brand, utilising variations of the letter “S.” However, they lacked explicit symbolism of technology or code

✨ Total score — 10/25

Making a second attempt

This time we wanted to see what Midjourney would come up with, with just a description of the sketch, without the image upload of the sketch itself.

Logos generated

Okay now we were really impressed.

While they were obviously wayyy too complicated to work as logos, these isometric renditions, effectively conveyed the concepts of “community” and have the potential to work as great key visuals in marketing collaterals.

Thoughts on Challenge 2: Was Midjourney better at digitalising a logo?

• Were they of higher quality? Yeah! We felt it performed quite well in translating the sketch into a digital format of it while refining the original version of the sketch along the way.
• Was it faster? Midjourney was definitely much faster at transforming our sketches into images with cool visual effects. But it still fell short in producing readily usable logomarks.
• Did it inspire us? Yeah! These images were interesting because of the multi-dimensional blocks and unique shapes that they made with them. It was a good source of inspiration for how the conference itself could be branded and what collaterals could come out of it.

Overall, though the logos didn’t score so well with our predefined criteria, they were still really nice visuals. While they were too raw and needed a lot more work before we would be able to use them for a logo, Midjourney’s ability to breathe life into the initial sketches was undeniable.

Challenge 3: Improve an existing logo

👾 Midjourney Tool: /Blend

For the final challenge, our goal was to assess Midjourney’s ability to enhance and build on our existing logo designs. We selected a few of our own logos and used the Blend tool to see what Midjourney would generate.

Logos we wanted to blend:

Logos generated

OKAY WOAH HOLD UP, Stalk? This is a government conference, not a surveillance programme.

🖍️ Simple: 3/5
The blended logos still maintained a certain level of complexity with overlaying elements, which made them less suitable for clean and straightforward logo designs

🧠 Memorable: 1/5
None of the blended logos stood out as particularly memorable or unique. They relied heavily on text (and the font choice was bad) and lacked visually interesting elements to be remembered

⏱️ Timeless: 1/5
These were the definition of generic. The colours used also felt very old and out of style

🧩 Versatile: 2/5
Most of the logos contained some very tiny elements that wouldn’t be visible if scaled to a smaller size

✌️ Appropriate: 1/5
None of these logos had any indication of the brand story. The only elements used were text, plus it lacked relevance with regard to the styling choices

✨ Total score — 8/25

Alright, the logos generated in this set weren’t even nice and we didn’t like them. The results were a mishmash of copy mishaps that left us bewildered.

Because this went so horribly, we made a second attempt and reverse-engineered the process using the Describe tool

👾 Midjourney Tool: /Describe

This time, we let Midjourney generate the prompts based on our logos and fed the prompts back into the Imagine tool to see what we would get.

Logos generated

So much better this time.

The visuals were visually striking and memorable and definitely stood out from typical stock images. However, their design elements and color choices leaned towards current logo trends (they kinda had a Web3.0 vibe), potentially making them less timeless. These visuals were also much better suited as standalone images rather than logos.

Thoughts on Challenge 3: Was Midjourney better at improving on an existing logo?

• Were they of higher quality? Not really. Unfortunately Midjourney didn’t do so well in this challenge. It not only stopped short at improving our logos, but made them worse in the process.
• Was it faster? Comparing the time it would take to tweak these logos to something usable versus asking another designer for feedback and suggestions on improvement, it might actually be faster just to ask someone. Plus they could do up a sketch and you could always feed it back into Midjourney.
• Did it inspire us? Yeah! The logos we got in the second attempt with the /Blend tool were much better, and gave us some ideas in terms of colours we could potentially use.

The Verdict

Challenge scoreboard

Okay so here’s the deal, our logos scored better but they did well because we as designers (or maybe just Zhi Ying and Alvin) understand the fundamental principles of what makes a great logo and we understood the brief. Midjourney on the other hand, didn’t, because it isn’t built to specialise in logos. It just knows what logos look like but not why they look like that so it is unable to create something based on those principles to fulfil a brief.

And what truly makes a great logo isn’t just a nice wordmark and icon, but an image that has a concept — that tells a story. Let’s take some examples from some of the most prominent logos today.

What makes these logos work?

1. Formula 1: The logo resembles a racing car track and captures the excitement and energy of the sport through its visual treatment and colour choice
2. FedEx: The logo cleverly incorporates a hidden arrow between the letters “E” and “x,” symbolizing the company’s speed and efficiency in delivering packages
3. Amazon: The logo conveys the brand’s comprehensive product range (from A to Z) through an arrow connecting the letters “a” and “z and the arrow also forms a subtle smile, expressing customer satisfaction and delight

A good logo tells a story. And creative thinking is required to come up with a smart way of doing that

📚 Midjourney doesn’t know how to tell a story. It’s simply a tool to create literal visuals from prompts you input. So while you may get pretty logos, you won’t get clever ones without doing some thinking yourself to engineer it into a prompt.

🛠️ Plus, like any other design tool, you’d need to learn how to use it to communicate your vision effectively.

✏️ On a technical level, Midjourney currently doesn’t have the capabilities to handle text (I mean, we saw how badly it did with…Stalk 👀) so that would still require a designer to work on the typography.

🗂️ Finally, on a more practical level, logos also need to be in vector format. This is to make sure that it’s scalable, editable and of a manageable file size (especially important if it’s going to load on a website). So you’d still need a way to vectorise it.

All in all, we’d happily add it to our design toolkit, but can we completely farm off the whole logo design process to Midjourney? Not yet. 😉

The TL;DR

The good

✅ Good for idea generation and brainstorming for visual elements to borrow and colours to use

✅ Good for illustration-heavy logos and literal logos

✅ Good for generating key visuals

The meh

❌ Doesn’t produce visuals with good stories or concepts

❌ Doesn’t work well with text, you’d still need a designer to do the typography

❌ Not so straightforward to use, requires learning how to use it as a tool (learning how to write effective prompts)

❌ Doesn’t produce vectorised formats of images, which is necessary for logos

For more ideas and tips on how to use AI in UX work, check out this other great article that our teammate wrote!

UX-ing with ChatGPT and MidJourney

👋 Signing off
- Alvin
- Zhi Ying
- Shaina