MyBrandNewLogo – A 3-step Logo Generator | Hacker News Reader

MyBrandNewLogo – A 3-step Logo Generator

mybrandnewlogo.com

365 pointsandy_adams104 comments

I don't get the hate this one's getting. I don't think Apple or Google are going to use a site like this for getting their logos made but there are millions of other blogs, social media handles who don't mind a decent looking logo or an idea they can customise further. I think this is an excellent effort and I can already see myself using it.

Agreed!

[Selfplug]

If you want to see how similar your logo is compared to stock icons from the noun project database or logos of the top million websites, you can try these services that I built as part of my research into shape similarity.

http://compute.vision/nouns/index.html

http://compute.vision/brands/index.html

These aren't the latest iterations of the algorithm but they fare pretty well most of the times.

Here are the results for the logo of Mybrandnewlogo:

http://compute.vision/nouns/index.html?barnacles=https://s3....

http://compute.vision/brands/logo-results.html?uhash=HTH0LBU...

Edit: Formatting

I don't really see any difference between this and the others such as Logojoy. What I don't like about these services is that some tout AI generated logos etc etc when really they just take some input and generate the same logos over and over. There is no real AI going on.

Pedantically, AI really encompasses and represents a broad range of ML approaches, many of which are fundamentally just algorithmic. If there's a rubric for producing these and its intended to simulate the approach a human might take, one could argue it's artificial intelligence.

More pedantically, there’s no intelligence in ML; AI doesn’t exist (yet).

This devolves really quickly into debates on semantics. Which is not a bad thing, but it means it's important to be clear on definitions.

I've heard Artificial Intelligence snarkily defined as "whatever computers can't do" - once a human understands the problem well enough to make a computer solve it, solving the problem is no longer "AI".

What this says about human intelligence, if-and-when a computer can perform the full set of tasks a human can perform, is left as an exercise to the reader.

In any case, right now, a computer can provide answers to certain problems much more quickly and accurately than a human, and can provide more optimal answers. Whether a particular computer does this via hand-tuned heuristics, brute force applied to simple algorithms, or statistics over massive data sets, or some magic "AI" voodoo, it does it.

> many of which are fundamentally just algorithmic.

Are there non-algorithmic approaches to ML?

That's sort of my point.

Take the KNN: an absurdly simple algorithm that can do some pretty impressive stuff.

People file it under ML without a lot of hesitation because it can reproduce or approximate human output.

I think the flexibility and self correction of an algorithm is what defines ML, but AI isn't so rigidly defined. If you can do something that seems like it came from a human you probably have a good argument, even if your approach is simple.

Back in the mid-00s there was a logo sweatshop called Arteis (later bought by HP) where people of widely disparate creative backgrounds pumped out logos for businesses, some as many as a few dozen a day. They, too, all looked pretty much cut from a template, because thinking requires time and the pay was about 1/10th you'd pay an equivalent Graphic Designer to do it over their lunch hour. It's just generating pretty cookie-cutter stuff whether by hand or by machine.

You definitely get what you pay for, either way.

Check out logotournament.com

Sounds like what 99designs.com does

For many use cases, whether it's technically AI or not isn't really relevant.

I'm at the point where I don't have a budget for a designer, but don't have the design talent to make a good logo myself. It's either Fiverr or an automated tool, and this particular one was the first tool I've used where I was ready to snag the first designs it generated to use on a business card. AI or not, whatever they're doing to generate these works better than my alternatives.

Yeah, this is more like a random logo generator than something that's ML powered. I guess it could be using PCA or something on the backend to filter out "bad" logo designs.

I'd like to see more variations with the shapes. You see stars repeated a million times, it would be nice if the stars were actually different in size, shape and design.

I have a degree in AI, and studied it back when it wasn't popular. If I've learned anything, it's that AI is nothing magical. This system is more like classic machine learning using decision trees. It would be nice to try a real neural network, but I haven't found a way yet to come up with neural network generated vector shapes that also look nice.

I'm trying to keep the focus on AI to a minimum on my site. To me it doesn't matter. It's just automated logo design using lots of math. And lots of custom algorithms to generate colors and to position shapes.

It would be great for the system to at least move further down the logo image cue and not reuse the first three pictures or so. Could you add a button to fetch a new portion of images?

Not sure what you mean by fetching a new portion of images?

One of the upcoming deploys will get a feature where you can pick a logo and make new variations based on its fonts, colors or layout. A quick prototype showed that it really helps with getting to a good result fast: Like the colors? generate new fonts / layouts. Like the layout? generate new colors / fonts.

It looks like only a few top logo images are used for all randomly generated cards. And theses logos are often boring.

Before I clicked the link, I expecting this to be pretty useless, but I was pleasantly surprised. I'm sure lots of thought went into logos like Electron's or Angular, but at the end of the day, there just needs to be a catchy symbol people can visualize when they think of your project.

That said, I probably wouldn't use these logos for an app or anything that needs a strong brand, but they're perfect for little Github projects. They're kinda generic, which is what I expected, but there was more variation in the generated logos than I expected there to be. Even if the designs are pretty generic, I can see this being pretty useful for non-designers who wanna write a library that has a semblance of an attractive README.

These logos are as good as those I've seen produced by "professional" graphic designers.

That isn't the ringing endorsement one might imagine it to be.

This is about as valuable as a “3-Step Code Generator” that asks you for a few words that describe what your code should do, then takes a random code snippet and inserts your words as variable names. A small business may not be able to afford a programmer, but still have a use for decent code. Or, you could use it as inspiration for a programmer you hire later!

That made some logos Im very interested in (and we happen to be looking for a new logo). Just wondering if the icons are internally created or from another collection?

Edit: Looks like they're not unique icons, damn.

Edit 2: Since they're using nounproject, I hope they're properly licensing the works and not just assuming they're creative commons so it's free. I'm not seeing any credits given on their site or anything about the logo including the royalty free license.

They have a paid API [1]. So I believe they're paid users and paid users don't have to attribute.

[1]: https://thenounproject.com/developers/

Their api guides say you can’t resell so that’s why I’m confused I guess.

Everything is properly licensed via a paid API subscription.

Wouldn't it be a bad idea to base your logo on a creative commons work?

Yeah that immediately turned me off.

I was hoping https://mybrandnewlogo.com/how-it-works was a little more in depth of how it actually works but I suppose if they gave away their secret they wouldn't make any money :)

I'm guessing they have a stock library of vector art somewhere. I'd love to know what library / libraries they have used.

Edit / added:

On a different topic. I routinely by logos from Fiverr for about slightly more than these (typically $80 - $100) and generally speaking the one's from fiver weren't using any stock art.

I had a difficult time with the "keywords" portion - I'm assuming they're tying keywords to an icon library.

It'd probably be more useful to have a list of words to select from, rather than guessing which ones will be useable by their algorithm.

It would indeed be a good idea to have some sort of suggestion UI in this step.

The way that a lot of these logo generators work is actually using Noun Project[0], which keeps very good tags for vector icons.

[0] https://thenounproject.com/

That's an incredible resource. Thanks so much for posting. I'm wondering how the licenses apply if I modify an icon, or merge two together. Happy to attribute both authors but would that even be allowed?

Edit: it is.

> Yes, you can modify and build upon the symbol as long as you follow proper attribution requirements. You can use the icon for free as long as you attribute, or pay via a NounPro subscription

Well played, I searched the terms I used and immediately found the "logos" here.

Do you have anyone on fivver you'd recommend in particular? I've had pretty bad luck with designers just reusing logos but charging full rate.

It’s pretty easy to do your own due diligence. Just look at reviews and past projects. Contact them and ask for more of their portfolio; it’s an interview after all.

If they do a poor job even after that, make sure you review it fairly with detail so that others don’t fall into their trap. You also have control of releasing funds, which can be used last resort as leverage for them to try again if they delivered poorly.

It’s a little more work to find the good ones but they are there, and in my experience the extra effort can save you a lot of money.

This is really cool, some great logo redesign inspiration.

A couple of thoughts: 1) If you make the logo designs page shareable (step 2, https://mybrandnewlogo.com/logo-designs), I would love to get feedback from a few people. If you don't want to store things persistently, even storing the input params (name, color, slogan, etc) in the URL would be great. 2) I love that the name can be read as my "brand new" logo, or as my brand, new logo.

I went to share results with coworkers and came to the same realization you did.

1. If you register and save your logo, you'll get a page that you can share, for example: https://mybrandnewlogo.com/share/2P1qwAO85EtvRNgvkQGn

You can share a couple of your logo pages on social, and gather feedback from your friends.

2. That's the idea, glad you like it :)

Cool, thanks! That's a good enough value prop for me to register :)

Step 1: Load a bunch free font families

Step 2: Load a bunch of icons with alt names.

Step 3: Randomize 1 and 2 as well as position and colors.

I wish good design was algorithmically that simple, but is not. These are good logos for maybe a placeholder or testing something out, but they will never have the quality of a real well thought design.

Was thinking much the same; we have a product[1] in the same space, but a much larger inventory, all created by hand. Not sure the "AI" space for design is quite good enough for this price point.

[1] https://www.brandcrowd.com/maker

I actually really like your service! However the pricing isn't obvious on the site.

Thanks! The core team working on this is super smart. I'll pass your feedback on pricing to our product manager.

That's true, but if you parameterize enough variables and generate enough combinations, you'll eventually find a result with great design. For a non-designer like myself who might want a neat logo on a software project I'm working on, randomly generating stuff like this and picking the best one is something I'd try before opening up Illustrator or hiring someone.

I think the main problem with this service is that the parameters are probably pretty simple and it's gonna mostly output generic patterns.

This worked better than I expected.

For a quick project this is better than going to fiverr.

I made an ACME logo using mountain as a tag and got a nice mixture of logos with various mountains.

So obviously a nice royalty free(I hope) collection of vector art is indicated with proper tags.

EDIT: Pricing does seem a bit crazy for what is an auto-generated logo. (In Theory it shouldn't matter who made the logo but psychologically one feels more comfortable paying a live human being $50 instead of a bot).

Quite impressed with the way this handled some edge cases I tried out. (Four word company name with the third word having 20 characters, twenty word string etc.) I'm sure a lot of thought went into algorithmizing how to best represent a string of unbroken text in a given space and make it look good at the same time.

Edit: Grammar

Thanks. There's lots of math going on to make sure the visual parts are positioned nicely. Not everything always works perfectly, but I think for most cases it's working well.

I typed in "cocoon" and it gave me typewriters as my logos...Nice website, but deliverable, not great.

Silver-lining: There will "always" be work for designers who take their time to understand the depth behind a logo/company and create something unique.

Really well done. I especially like that there's a "pricing" tab, although I missed that at first.

From the tab:

One low-resolution logo file as inspiration for your designer.

Some commenters didn't like the service b/c the results look too "generic." I see this as a different kind of service that fills a very particular need: people rarely know what they want in a logo if that's not their area of focus.

Being able to flip through some possibilities and make simple changes on the fly makes it a lot easier to figure out what you want.

Mine came out pretty good. I'm impressed. https://i.imgur.com/gogGNws.png

Author here. Happy to answer any questions.

Off-topic: Thank you for creating monokai!

Hah, glad you enjoy it! Never thought that something I created 13 years ago would still be so widely in use :)

I used 99designs a few years back to get my company's logo. It was cheap, fast and good. You get to choose from several designs submitted by real designers and work with them to fine tune it. I am still very happy with the results.

This service has pretty generic results, IMO.

99designs = 50% clip art + 50% blatant rips of existing logos + the StackOverflow logo.

That is, be sure to check you didn't end up with a stolen logo.

Should be like 99percentchanceofbeingstolen as those sites basically encourage logo theft. There's no other way to make money at those rates.

Ja not bad... I will give the usual props for getting a side project out and launched (That really is the hard part for me at least". It is a bit broken on mobile (at least for me - borked spacing). *Side rant: But I really want a decent-website-redesign service(just concept no css or anything).

My current site(https://www.fibretiger.co.za) looks like a Christmas tree that took psychedelics.. :/ I've always been put off by the high cost of the "design-competitions" like 99Designs cause I could just see them recycling bootstrap themes with better colours:/

This is, remarkably, not terrible. As others have pointed out, no unicorn is going to use something like this but, as someone who has been hired to design several logos for small projects, this would get the job done for many people.

So the output pretty much looks like your average .io domain website then.

Perhaps our view of the affordability of logo design is coloured by those $250,000 rebranding exercises we hear about from large corporations.

In the UK, a freelance designer's hourly is, in my experience, around £50. If you have an idea of what you want, a good designer would be able to give you some options and a full logo pack in a day's work.

Sure, that's unaffordable in a lot of circumstances but, if you're designing a logo for a business, it's not gonna be one of your largest expenses.

It actually works pretty nicely. I put some more uncommon keywords such as 'enlightement' and it generated a happy face with an eye in the forehead. I'm impressed.

Are there any of these logo design apps that are actually free? (e.g. to get the SVG file?)

I just need a quick placeholder logo for a blog so I don't want to spend $$

You can try https://logomakr.com/ - they have an upsell, but you can get the basic version of the logo for free.

Careful, if the page refreshes then you'll lose all your options!

I did like quite a few of them too, even without giving a slogan or any keywords.

Maybe it's good to have an extra confirmation popup after 5 times clicking "make more logos" when the page refreshes, thanks.

shameless plug

You can also try some custom shapes and patterns with https://gridgenerator.com :)

Here are some examples: https://www.instagram.com/gridgenerator/

SSL Cert date error

Thankx! fixed :)

My trials yielded tons of company name + some variation of a star combination ... not very creative. The three descriptive words seemed to have little impact on the results whereas a quality designer would leverage the descriptive words to anchor ideas/concepts.

I think I found a bug. If you put an emoji in the slogan the generated logos all come up empty!

The final logos are created with vector shapes from the font files. There are no fonts that include emojis, so that's why the system couldn't create any logo for you. I should display a better message explaining this, thanks.

Seems very nice, but it also appears like they have few stock images per keyword/topic and they would be overused after a relatively short time. Am I not getting something? Are they supposed to take out an image once the logo is sold?

Similiar to Vistaprint. I can tell who used them when they give me their business card.

That's surprisingly good

Awesome UX and the results were surprisingly great. Really love this tool.

I do like that the front page examples are all of logos that remain recognizable when you render them in just 2 color black and white.

Too many logos out there are aren't really "logos".

When you purchase a logo package, you'll actually get multiple color variants: full color, black and white, white on transparent, black on transparent, etc.

So how does trademark work with a logo that is essentially made entirely out of CC artwork? Wouldn't another company be able to legally "steal" your logo in theory?

Looks great especially for generating logo ideas

After you get your logo done you might find you have an ongoing need for a bunch of day-to-day, maintenance graphic design. If that sounds like you then check out Design Butler™ --> https://designbutler.co. We provide Unlimited Graphic Design (flat rate, all-inclusive) - web, print, social, infographics, presentations and more.

Input fields on register form cannot be selected on iOS (native browser and Firefox)

Generated a logo that I could have actually used, and is contextual. Pretty good!

Some nice alternatives:

* Logojoy * LogoPony * Logomaster.ai * brandmark.io

ref: https://www.saashub.com/my-brand-new-logo-alternatives

What, no kerning?

Proper keming is an extra 50€

Someone could trivially put all sites like this out of business by creating a chrome extension that just extracts the SVGs it shows you from the page and downloads them.

This is very well done, both in the results I got from using it and the UI experience while using it.

Interesting, I like it.

The most amusing thing about this website is that they obviously had an actual designer do some work on it at some point, yet it implies that designers can be easily automated out of the process.

All of the "logos" this thing generates are completely thoughtless: it simply searches the Noun project based on your inputs for a vector image, then sets it next to a random typeface. Anyone with a modicum of design experience can tell you that these "logos" that it generates are a complete joke. If you're honestly considering using one of these yourself, just head to the noun project and search for an icon to plop down next to your favorite typeface—you'll probably come up with a better result.

I think most of these are sort of "logos for the masses" type things.

They're not replacing a professional designer as much as they're there for folks who don't have a designer / not going to but would like a logo.

Yeah, to me this seems great if you're working on an open-source project or are just barely getting off the ground and just need some sort of logo. I can see myself using this for silly projects where I just want to have a placeholder or temporary logo for a made-up name while I think about what I really want it to look like.

Yeah some little side project of mine, want logo, can't make fancy pics... there ya go.

All of our internal webapps use some sort of logo on their readme.md, generated from sites like these

None of our internal webapps produce revenue or are customer facing, but developers like some kind of identity for their pet projects. These sites are perfect for this sort of thing.

I don't believe that designers can be automated out of the process.

I made this service because after years of co-running a design agency, I saw an increase in the need for logos, but a decrease in the willingness to pay for it. For bigger companies, it's no problem to hire a design agency to do their branding process. And yes, you can do more thoughtful and tailored design. We still do this at our design agency.

On the other hand, there are lots of people who simple don't have the budget for a logo design process, don't have illustrator / photoshop skills, and just really want something nice for a good price. I tried my best to create an online, automated solution that's specifically made for these people, the freelancers, the side-hustlers, the startups.

Don't let the negativity get to you. Obviously no kind of automated logo service is going to displace high quality custom design work, but this service is great for small projects that just want a presentable logo today so they can focus on other things. Most of YouTube runs on affordable royalty-free music in the background too.

i think you hit the nail with the service. good job, i like it.

While completely thoughtless, a lot of the ones I got from a brief test were better than design submissions you would get on 99designs.

I'd love to see a blow by blow breakdown article/video of a "good" logo from a generator vs. a good logo from a professional designer.

(i.e. keep it fair by choosing among the better logos the generator creates)

To my untrained eye, it's hard to spot the difference $10,000 makes.

Found the designer :)

I do logos sometimes for long-time graphic design clients and friends. A lot of times what they'll do is use an app like this and then send me the results, with a list of things they don't like about it, or a few tweaks they'd like made to the shapes. For example, "this oval shape but in 3D and more classy" or "this font but with these two letters customised like this."

I actually really like this arrangement and have on more than one occasion sent these kinds of links to my clients, with "as a starting point" or similar phrasing. For people with ideas that are not visual yet, it really helps them speak the designer's language, in a small way.

But yeah, I make the same money (rate, I don't really need extra design work) with this arrangement as I do without, and it's more pleasant for the client, and they see the value of my work... It's not bad! Sometimes it's nice to do away with the designer-as-sole-visionary role and more concretely embrace what the owner has to say about their brand. They're usually open to feedback and ideas too, if any.

Completely agree with your points. I do graphic design for some friends guilds in a few video games (free labour, I do it for fun) and people are horrible at describing what they want. As such, these days I tend to send a few rough drafts or some sample images other people made to get a feel for what people actually want.

This kind of rapid prototyping technology, while not that great for creating a final project, is an excellent tool for aiding in communicating what is wanted, especially if simple enough so that a client can use it.

I disagree. For side projects or bootstrapped companies these “cookie cutter” logos are exactly the right thing to get something into the Wild. Once you find some traction/income/investment then it makes sense to go full designer route.

Unless you've never created anything in your life try be a bit more supportive of others who do.

I tested it and it kicked off a few ideas. Some were very close to usable for a side project I'm working on, where I don't need a 300-hour logo, I just need point-of-parity logo.

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