Show HN: A neural net that critiques your logo | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A neural net that critiques your logo

brandmark.io

152 pointsJack00061 comments

I tried our company's logo (https://bench.co/press-kit/#brand), which I think is pretty strong, and it gave it high marks.

But then I tried a very bad logo ("Kate's Florist" from http://www.paulmurraydesign.com/graphic-design/how-to-spot-a...) and it was ranked almost as good.

I think the Bench logo is confusing. I've never heard of the company before, but the logo looks like it might read "Bench Pi". It's the pi symbol in a shield (although it's so small it's very hard to tell at first glance), so... I'd guess the company has something to do with setting math-based benchmarks as some sort of metric-as-a-service?

[looks at about page]

Okay, no, it's nothing like that at all. The logo gave me the wrong first impression of the company.

The bench looks like a "registered/trademark" symbol (it's in the same position). That's confusing.

It just looks like something akin to superscript to me. I did not associate it with ©®™ at all.

So the rules given are Uniqueness, Legibility, Color/Contrast with a very simplistic description of each which I imagine reflects the rules used. That logo passes with flying colours according to their criteria, perhaps lower marks for legibility. Needless to say, there are more things to logo design than are dreamt of in this philosophy.

There's more about how they use deep learning here:

http://brandmark.io/intro/

but for me it seems the constraints they've chosen are ill-conceived (things like matching logo strength to font weight) and unlikely to come up with something inspiring or even decent a lot of the time or rank things well which humans would have no difficulty recognising. This is a difficult problem, and I wouldn't expect rules based solutions to work very well, though some kind of permutation engine starting from known good designs could work better.

Good point.

I guess it is a fair assumption that the neural network is trained using a corpus of logos that already look "well made" to the human eye.

It is possible there may not have been any/many samples that would be considered bad.

It would be interesting to see how this neural net evaluates a bad logo, using a tool such as LIME.

Cool! I tried it with our logo (https://www.airbornos.com/images/logo-mark.png), which is super generic (I spent $0 on it). It came up as 96% unique, even though there's two icons of clouds in the list of similar icons. Furthermore, it would be cool if it looked for similarity with a database of other logos as well, and not just icons.

Other small point: maybe you could show the uploaded logo again next to the other logos in the "Color/Contrast" and "Overall" categories, to (probably) drive home the point how bad your logo is in comparison.

Yeah, two nearly identical versions (probably only resolution differences) of our logo resulted in 21% & 94% similarity scores

it's definitely not perfect. I think the embedding-vector approach of image search isn't scale invariant.

Forgive me if this is a naive question, as I am not well versed in ML.

Would it be possible to train using Mechanical Turk so that you get real human feedback and perception of quality?

Considering all the bad logos in the world that humans make, use and like - I wouldn't bet on it.

Found a bug, I think.

I tried it with the company logo image pulled from our website[1], which happens to have a bunch of text in it. (It's more like a combination logo+wordmark, I guess)

The circle which should contain the uniqueness metric score was blank[2], even though the script claimed to find 145 similar icons (which aren't at all similar!)

[1] The logo file: http://www.sequentec.co.uk/application/files/3714/2375/7226/...

[2] Screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Wx6pDNYe2_bkVrejFvbFBFSjg...

Your website reports this error on http://www.sequentec.co.uk

An unexpected error occurred. Module 'timezonedb' already loaded

Ha. A bug in exchange for a bug! Cheers - I'll look into it.

yeah it doesn't really work for word-based logos. It's based on thenounproject, which has mostly square-ish icons.

This was on reddit a couple of days ago and the thread was full of examples of bland logos that scored really well and good or notable logos that scored very poorly.

I wouldn't take this neural net output too seriously.

The training size is 1 mil logos - that alone makes one wonder how this mil was ranked in the first place to separate good logos from the junk that is bound to comprise a pool of logos that huge.

if the tool told you something you already knew - that notable logos are good, what would be the point?

maybe there's more value in discussing why the algorithm thinks bland logos score higher than the notable ones.

I saw this on /r/design last night[1], haven't tried it yet, but based on the comments, it's not as intelligent as advertised. It ranks low the uniqueness of the Nike logo and high a dumb meme.

I'm not complaining, the technology is cool and no doubt it will get to a point that it can critique objectively a logo, but it's not yet here.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/6wz4ho/logo_rank_is...

Well, is that wrong?

Is the Nike logo really a unique logo purely from a design perspective, or has its extremely strong brand made it a successful logo despite its actual design not being very unique? Whereas a dumb meme is the opposite -- terrible brand, but very unique.

The tool clearly can only look at actual visual design, not branding or any meaning within the image. And in that limited context, it seems successful. I'm not sure it is reasonable to expect it to go beyond a purely visual evaluation of the logo.

maybe that image really is a better logo than nike :]

- on a uniqueness front there are a lot of swooshes, peppers and moustaches that look sort of similar to nike, whereas that image is guaranteed to not have been used for any icon or logo, ever.

- both are fairly legible

- the meme is certainly more colorful and eye-catching

the neural net doesn't really judge the aesthetics of a logo, and it doesn't have any idea what the content of the image is. It just impassively gives you a score based on the similarity to thenounproject icons and a few other parameters.

As I said, I'm not complaining, so don't take it wrong. But that's not a «logo rank», that's an image evaluation. What it should do first is figure out whether it looks like a logo, or not; if it's a simple shape, with few colors, it might be a logo (yes, there are logos with complicated shapes and a lot of colors—the algorithm should decrement its score based on this criteria).

My point is that your tool is very cool, I wish I could do something like that—but that's not a «logo rank», it's a «how unique, legible and eye-catching the image you upload is» rank.

Not much unique about the Nike spinnaker, Newport cigarettes were using inverse of the "Nike" logo a few years prior

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.4.min.js. (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).

rookie mistake

Great work.

I don't feel comfortable commenting on the accuracy since art is somewhat subjective and I am not an artist. Though I realize that many things in art can be measured.

So two logos I paid about $75 each for on Fiverr got 85/100 and 95/100 overall ranking respectfully. Which makes me feel good about the money spent on my logos :)

A logo we spent quite a bit more on from an agency got a 96/100 which is ironic to me because I like the other ones better.

Neat!

Found a minor bug: it seems like if you upload an SVG that it gets internally rendered at a pretty low resolution, I got better results when I converted it to a 512x512 PNG myself and re-uploaded.

Edit: it also should probably mention that it only really works with square logos ;)

36 out of 100 for nugget's logo - https://nugget.one/img/logo-without-tag-grey-600.png

That sucks because I really like it!

Ok, this is weird. The robot by itself gets 100 out of 100.

https://nugget.one/img/logo-robot-only.png

I guess there's still a few kinks to work out.

I haven't really dabbled in AI but my gut feeling is it's quite difficult to make an AI that can match up with human expectations.

The robot theme on its own is too reminiscent of Android, and the name is too low-contrast on a thin font.

I don't mean to be vulgar, but the robot looks like two penises penetrating a condom.

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property 'uniqueness_score' of null

someone's been abusing the server.. time to put up a captcha I guess :/

I had a few realizations of 2D brownian motion that I had generated on Processing laying around. Three of them are illegible, unmemorizable gibberish but get 90+ scores.

I wonder how the logos made by http://www.horriblelogos.com would rank

YMMV, but it gave my white square with the word "Titty" in black Verdana 72 a 42/100, so it might not really be especially tough.

Or maybe it knows users better than you think.

Idea is interesting. But it goes off the rails on the Apple logo which is shown as one of the exemplar logos that pops up. Not critical, hopefully some feedback to improve the tool

1) It gives a low uniqueness score because there are fonts include an apple that imitates the apple logo not the other way around. score 30!?!?!

2) black apple on white fields gives a contrast score of 50?? uhmm...

one or two exact-matches doesn't affect the score much. It considers the aggregate similarity of the 150 most similar icons, out of 1M icons. In Apple's case it's mostly because there are a lot of apple icons that look very similar. Apple's logo is iconic because they've built a brand for decades and with billions of dollars. Without that, maybe the shape itself isn't so unique?

the color/contrast score is 50% color and 50% contrast. So a b/w logo will get exactly 50%

Using Firefox, I uploaded a favicon.ico file (1KB in size) pulled from a website, and the spinner icon has been spinning for a few minutes now. It seems like it doesn't work with Firefox and/or with favicon.ico and/or files that are of that size.

For ease of use, I'd prefer that this page also accept a URL to an image or icon on the Internet.

Works for me on Firefox (on Ubuntu) with a jpg. I tried uploading a favicon.ico file and ran into the same issue.

hey guys

this is the same neural net I use for the logo generator on brandmark.io - it basically does a visual similarity search on thenounproject to see how much your logo stands out from stock icons.

it's intended to rate the technical/objective aspects of logo design, without judgement on aesthetic/subjective preferences.

let me know what you think!

Really cool generator. Got 87 points overall for my "logo": https://latency.at/favicon.png

I'd expected it to score lower than 66 points on the uniqueness. But guess there aren't many this simple logos.

1. Style is uniqe perspective of every person.

2. Logo.... is .... logo....

3. This tool sucks and steals your time

4. :)

Just a suggestion: after uploading a logo it would be nice if I could share the URL of the results. And this would make your site more popular

New project I'm working on got a 97. http://imgur.com/a/fVqCB

Cool.

Color-contrast seems highly dependend on how much whitespace there is within the image. It should evalute with some added white padding.

It gave the black apple logo on white field a score of 50

I like how the Chrome logo gets a score of 3% ... because the Chrome logo is already in its library of icons -___-

I could'nt found the Terms of Use. What happens to the logo when you upload it ?

Is it keeped ? Deleted ? Used in any way ?

deleted after a day

Thanks !

I uploaded a stock image and got a 88% overall. I really can't make any decisions based on this.

Where did you procure your logo dataset? Is it available to the public or for purchase?

see thenounproject.com

It said my English based logo was similar to Hebrew/Arabic logos.

It cropped it into a square. It has to be a square image you upload?

Took an SVG and treated it properly; good job.

When will the AI fad finally die?

I'm guessing when it stops being useful and/or interesting for the public and for developers. On that basis, I would expect "never" to be a reasonable answer.

It's just getting started...

Everything great in the world was once shitty.

I like it!

Don't really believe in logo automatization.

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