Brand: Beauty From Ashes
Designer: Christie Raymond, AI Assisted
From Brand Brief to Brand Guidelines
Present Brand Brief (1.5 hours) - Presenting a brand brief to AI involves feeding the AI tools with the key details and instructions necessary for it to understand the vision, values, and goals of the brand. I prompted AI with key information brand values, mission, target audience, etc.) into AI-driven platforms to start the process.
This process did not happen in one step. I presented prompts to AI over a 4 hour time period on different platforms. Once I began to see which pompts worked best and got familiar with the tools, my feeding sessions went from 15 minutes to 3 minutes.
Ideation (3.5hours) - In the AI process, ideation is a collaborative effort where AI generates design elements, and the designer evaluates and refines them. I explored various AI-generated design suggestions based on the same brand brief and analyzed the results. To ensure the final output was of the highest quality, I used multiple platforms, each offering unique advantages. Some tools performed better than others, allowing me to choose the most effective solutions for the project. The platforms I utilized include MidJourney ($10 per month), Canva, Foto, Looka, and Tailor Brands.
Logo (time included in ideation) - It only took a few minutes to determine which platforms would be most effective for logo design. I spent about 20 minutes each on Canva and Looka, generating and refining logo concepts based on the AI’s suggestions. While the AI produced multiple options quickly, many of them didn’t fully align with the brand brief, requiring additional refinement to ensure a stronger connection to the brand’s identity.
Color Palette - Looka offered the most intuitive and seamless experience when it came to creating a cohesive color palette alongside the logo. The platform’s automated features allowed me to quickly generate a color scheme that perfectly complemented the logo design. With just a few clicks, Looka offered and recommended a well-balanced palette, which saved significant time. The ease of use and speed made Looka stand out as a highly effective tool for quickly aligning visual identity elements
Brand Guidelines - Once the logo was finalized, Looka automatically compiled a comprehensive set of brand guidelines, offering a cohesive and professional package. The platform generated guidelines that included logo usage, color palette, typography, and other essential brand elements. I had the option to purchase and download the full package instantly, which was incredibly convenient. Additionally, Looka provided immediate examples of how the brand assets would look in various contexts, making it easy to visualize the brand’s application across different media and platforms. This was not an option with Canva or Adobe Express Logo. Smashing Logo also offered a complete brand package and it too was instant with examples provided.
AI Citations
In 5 hours I used AI to generate a plethora of logos and style guides. Where does AI get it ideas from? Whose art inspired the ideas AI prsented to me?
Adobe Express Logo was the only application that provided citations for images. The process was very simple: click on your icon in the left-hand corner and a ‘source info’ pops up, click and a data box pops up with the asset ID.
Looka offers logo design tools with access to stock imagery and vector illustrations. It doesn’t typically provide detailed citation information but its AI-generated logos are based on licensed assets free from copyright issues once purchased.
TailorBrands uses its own library of design assets and templates that are licensed for commercial use therefor it doesn’t provide citations and their logos come with commercial usage rights.
Canva’s large free library of stock images, illustrations, and templates includes attribution requirements. It also provides licensing details for premium assets.
SmashingLogo doesn’t typically provide citation information for individual illustrations, stock images, or other design elements. Since the logo designs are generated from pre-existing templates and elements within the platform's library, these elements are assumed to be pre-licensed for commercial use
Evaluation of AI's Time & Design
Time Assessment - The time comparison between a traditional designer-led process and the AI-assisted process is quite revealing. It highlights the substantial difference in efficiency between human-driven design and AI-driven design. Human design took 55 hours while AI took 5!
Design Assessment
Originality - AI can produce visually striking and innovative designs, especially through models like MidJourney, DALL·E, and GANs, which remix existing artwork and design trends in unique ways.
Creativity - However, while AI can generate creative outputs, its creativity is limited by its reliance on pre-existing data, and it lacks a personal style or vision, often resulting in designs that feel derivative or generic.
Design Principles - In terms of design principles, AI excels in areas like balance, color harmony, and spacing but struggles with more nuanced elements such as visual weight and subtleties in repetition, which often require human refinement. A blind vote evaluating factors like visual appeal, coherence, and creativity would likely reveal that, while AI can generate impressive designs, human-designed work typically outperforms AI in originality and finer design details.