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Comment by austinjp | Hacker News Reader

A few of these are nice enough, but not "stunning". You really do need to pay a talented human for that, currently.

I'm a little concerned that automated creative services like this are encouraging a race to the bottom, a morass of bland identikit brands.

This is similar to the problem faced by music recommendation services: they don't surprise you, and most people like the occasional surprise.

Designers must be irritated and worried by logo design automation. They already have to scrape around for gigs, and find their work hugely undervalued.

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These automated logos are good for businesses that are just starting out. Once they're profitable, they're more able to invest their branding, and pay good money for good designers.

That's very good insight: like so many things you can start out successfully with something simple and expand/rebuild it later.

Frankly I'd worry about a company that invested a lot on its logo early. NeXT did and while they had other successes (cough OS X) the company itself didn't make it.

I can't remember ever having been stunned by a logo.

The height of my experiences could be described as:

"Oh, nice logo." or "Hmm, clever."

The line between "clever" and "trying too hard to be clever" is also quite fine.

Some logos become iconic, but that has as much to do with the brand itself as with the logo. Even if Microsoft had the Nike logo, it would still be uncool.

Their work isn't valuable. A logo, while prominent, rarely contributes anything of actual value to a company.

That's not true. I'm sometimes faced with a lot of companies to choose from and if one of those companies has a badly designed logo, I'll immediately become suspicious of all of their other qualities.

On the other hand, a really good logo doesn't have the opposite effect, because I know some designer (or AI, whatever) made it for them.

> "A few of these are nice enough, but not "stunning". You really do need to pay a talented human for that, currently."

Perhaps. Or you (or the creative human talent) could use this as a prototyping tool? Quick low cost brainstorming / iterations to a explore ideas before the high cost human talent kicks in.

Most clients __think__ they know what they want, but the reality is it's closer to "we'll know it when we see it." Getting some ideas in front of them - knowing all but one is going to be paid for - as quickly as possible is a blessing.

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