Those iterations suck. I'm not worried for my colleagues and I.
That being said! Many, MANY clients have questionable taste, and I can, indeed, see many who aren't sensitive to visuals to be more than happy with these Dall-E turd octopus logo iterations. Most people don't know and don't care what makes good graphic design.
For one thing, that final logo can't scale. For another, the colors lack nuance & harmony. The logo is more like a children's book illustration, and not something that is simple, bold, smart, and can be plastered on any and all mediums.
Just my 2 cents.
I bet in another 10-15 years, though, things might get a bit dicier for fellow graphic designers/ artists/ illustrators, though, as all this tech gets more advanced.
A more obtuse example, how many lift operators do you see today?
For those who do not know the reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
The thing you’re missing is AI generated content can be refined by AI. If Disney promised their meh looking movie would improve on its own over time, people would be line to it because it’s new, not just streamlined copy-pasted design we see all over media now
Painting the Titanic wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was organizing the process that produced its structure. That’s were AI content is now.
We’re generating the bulk structure pretty competently at this point. Refining the emotional touches will come faster.
Ultimately the average person (who is likely the target audience anyway) won't notice anything wrong with most of those iterations and given that they're basically free in comparison would make me worried. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to make it output svgs soon.
Weirdly, with the advent of AI, we might start to see exactly what it is that makes human beings special.
I never understood this logic, where the creator of something does something seemingly stupid and people are like "Well, don't use their project then if you don't like it". Instead of constructively calling the problem out, so the creator can try to make it better.
If my logo sucked, I'd like people to please tell me...
Because they define what the success is. If their goal is to make money they may want a logo which is the closest to optimal for getting clicks. If they want a private project, they may want it to be fun. And many other scenarios... You're welcome of course to do constructive criticism, but in the end it's up to them if they want to apply it.
However, once you reach a certain budget, it's much more involved to *choose* a logo that "fits" how the company wants to present itself, than it is to generate candidate logos of sufficient quality. I can assure you that the "many-chefs problem" for a high budget design project is very real, and the major cost driver. You have a mix of "design by committee", internal politics, what designers wants on their portfolios, etc etc.
That's a long time. I expect within a decade or two, "AI" should be able to generate an entire animated movie given nothing but a script.
I don't think it would be technically hard to build a model with current technology which can generate logos with the attributes which you mentioned. You could simply fine-tune a Dalle-E style model specifically on a smaller dataset of logos. This would just take a small dedicated team of domain experts to work on the problem.
I will say, though, I think DALL-E has opened up a new market for artists. I've gone to freelance graphic designers before, and been generally happy with the results, but it's pricey. So pricey that I honestly can't justify it for a new project I intend to sell or for an open source project I don't expect to make money from. It's usually much more cost-effective to even hire lawyers or even UI/UX people.
If I were an artist, I'd be experimenting with DALL-E, trying to run my own pirate version and learning everything about it. An artist empowered with DALL-E could give quick options to a client, iterate with them quickly, and test out some ideas before making the final work product. I'd guess a good artist who made good use of DALL-E could get a project done much faster and cheaper, and this would likely mean a lot more people hiring artists (if I could spend $100-200 for high-quality assets within a few days rather than $1000-2000, I'd gladly hire artists frequently).
I'm sure this will make some artists feel cheapened, but the reality is that art & technology have always evolved in dynamic and unpredictable ways. ML being essentially curve-fitting means that genuine inspiration and emotion is still far beyond our capabilities today, and that, ultimately, these models will only give us exactly what we ask for. A good (human) artist can go beyond that.
EDIT: Also, I agree with your assessment of the "work product," if we can call it that. I was unimpressed with the iterations, and especially the final product. I guess it's good the product is an open source tool. Nothing about the generated logo helped me understand what the OctoSQL tool did. Honestly, the name (which also IMO isn't excellent) is much more evocative than that logo. Why is the octopus wearing a hard hat? Why is it grabbing different colored solids? I guess the solids are datasets? But then the octopus is just exploring them? No thanks.
I can't think of a single well known logo that is even remotely close to what a company's product is. Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, McDonalds, Ford, Ferrari, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel, RedHat, Uber, Github, Duolingo, AirBnB, Slack, Twitter, IntelliJ, Steam.
I guess the Gmail logo does tell you it has something to do with mail though, so I did find one example.
So whereas Ford's brand is just a name, "Mustang" has a logo that really does tell you something about the car. You kind of understand when you see the galloping horse what it's meant to do.
Intel brands its CPUs with the name inside a square, which is colored to resemble (abstractly) a CPU.[0]
And Photoshop once had a logo that communicated what it did.[1]
As a brand becomes more established, it tends to be more abstract. Whereas Starbucks was once an elaborate siren (I interpreted it to be the siren call of espresso), details have been simplified over the years.[2] This is similar to the Photoshop magnifying glass logo becoming "Ps".
After the Apple I and Apple II, Apple sometimes used apple varieties (plus Lisa) to brand it's products (e.g. Macintosh, Newton). However, this largely stopped in the late 90s when Steve Jobs returned. Macintosh was shortened to Mac, and 'i' was prepended to various product names. Most new ones were descriptive e.g. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. The computers have retained "Mac" in the branding, along with "book" for notebooks (a convention predating Steve's return). The logos for all of these are just the names of the products typeset in its own San Francisco font; whenever Apple appears in a product name, the Apple logo is used instead.
So, yeah, I think it's reasonable to communicate what a product does or why a project exists with its logo. I didn't really see that w/ OctoSQL.
EDIT: I should also address Firefox & Chrome.
Firefox started as Phoenix (i.e. rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla). Phoenix had a trademark conflict, so was renamed Firebird. This also had a conflict, and Firefox was chosen after. In the Zeitgeist of the early aughts, Phoenix made a ton of sense: instead of extremely bloated chrome around the page as had been prevalent in Navigator and Internet Explorer, Phoenix gave you a tab bar (truly revolutionary), the navigation bad and the bookmarks bar. It was simple and clean, like a reborn Phoenix.
Chrome is interesting because the name is not related to traveling or navigation. It's telling you it's just the container for what you care about. But the logo is a bit more like a sphincter or an all-seeing aperture. I've never gotten the logo for Chrome outside a spyware context, but it has become successful.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...
[1] https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Adobe-Pho...
[2] https://miro.medium.com/max/2418/1*tJf7O6FPOmnErngygbBQDQ.pn...
But isn't the logo created for most people? Does it matter that, you as a designer, think it's bad if most people don't? I see it like modern fashion shows. I look at them and think the clothes are insane and I would never wear them, but obviously other fashion designers think they look good (I'm guessing?).
I do agree that the logo isn't super practical though, it's too textured and won't scale. I would take it to /r/slavelabour or Fiverr and pay someone to vectorize it and see what they come up with.
I understand your argument but I don't think that's the problem - the problem is that even most users don't understand what a good logo looks like (even if they like them) the same as users don't know what they want. It's a known fact that you shouldn't ask users of a software how it should be designed because if you'd let them design a software they want it would be shit.
I'll keep it mind, as I might still end up choosing a different one.
The chosen one is closer to my original vision, but you do have a point that the yellow ones look more polished.
Also, since time immemorial, databases are cylinders and data comes in cubes.
For logo purposes, these are both strong, while the second adds “personality”:
https://i.imgur.com/j6P4Oh4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kM23GZV.jpg
I really like the design breaking out of the strong circle, and your hard hat idea was great. That last one could have been your logo “as is”!
Though you could consider replacing the green cubes with cylinders, or simply hand add rubix cube lines to these green cubes to make them data cubes.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=data+cube&t=ha&va=j&ia=images&iax=...
Thanks for sharing the process!
There will probably be less need for designers of 'lower quality' simple images though.
If dale decides what we see, it might become what the next generation likes and considers “good taste”.
Taste is very complex: it's hierarchical, social, not fixed, not absolute, not rational, is specific to audience and has irregular overlaps across groups, much of it (all?) derived from human sensation and context-specific situations.
The path to something being considered as good taste is generally not simple: much of it flows through lines of power/desire/moment whose branches are not easy to trace as they're being formed. Much of taste is the hidden "why" which most of us never see.
It's realistic that Dall-E could understand what trends are on the rise, or in good taste … it's much harder to say if Dall-E could create something of originally good taste.
Assuming the status quo, true. As we evolve our lives around emerging AI tech I think we will at first be the curators and creative directors of AI, but eventually a creative agency will defer to the AI as it knows more about our tastes, market, audience, and the ENTIRE HISTORY of art, design, marketing, tastes, trends, and so on.
Eventually it won't make sense to have a stupid human rubber stamp what the all powerful AI suggests. Just as it does not make sense for Facebook to curate news feeds.
Maybe one day product advertising will look different depending on who looks at it. Pepsi logo "just for you".
That aside, a great use of these tools is to generate N spit-takes of wildly varying styles that you can present to the customer very quickly and very cheaply. Once you pin them down to a particular range of styles you can get down to the carving out the details by hand.
Right now, the input to DALL-E is all human generated.
What will happen is that DALL-E will generate something "close enough" that gets used and promulgated, so now the input to DALL-E will become increasingly contaminated with output from DALL-E.
We're already starting to see this in search engines where you get clickbait that seems to be GPT-3 generated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-supervised_learning
https://towardsdatascience.com/semi-supervised-learning-how-...
When you run a phrase, you get four images. Those images will stay in your history, but the ones you like you will save with the "save" button, so that they're in your private collection.
With this, you already have a great feedback system: saved - good, not saved - bad.
What's really interesting about this class of AIs is that they unbundle the two and you can play with them independently for the first time.
If nothing else, inspiration is just a click away. No more searching for ideas, just talk to the AI and it will pump out numerous ideas for you.
In my personal opinion as an (admittedly junior) ML engineer and lifelong artist, we've got <10 years before the golden age of human-made art is completely over.
Even if you get close to what you, the human, may like--it's difficult if not impossible to articulate what you like about it and iterate. Black box, keep trying random keywords... May as well grab a marker (read: hire a human)