Artificial intelligence just got a little more artful.

Zyro, a U.K.-based website building platform that offers solutions that include AI, has used cutting-edge machine learning to make a logo generator that can immediately produce a range of possible brand graphics.

“It’ll only take a minute of your time to design a logo for your business, no designer help needed,” Zyro boasts on its website. “The best bit is it’s free. You’ll be able to customize every element of your newly crated logo.”

According to Zyro, the AI Logo Maker uses designer-made elements that are combined, adjusted and modified to match a business’ identity and brand. The magic happens in a process that includes inputting a business name, choosing a logo template, adjusting the size, color and font of the proposed logo as desired, and then downloading.  

“The AI Logo Maker will always generate unique logos,” Zyro says. “The tool is smart enough to come up with logos that haven’t been used before.”

How’s the quality, though? Adweek’s Patrick Kulp said the results are “often crude and nonsensical,” while producing output that has a “tendency to appear slightly distorted.”

Zyro recently launched an AI logo generator trained on thousands of actual brand emblems that can instantaneously produce pages of potential brand graphics from scratch. https://t.co/xjaRyS5npr

— Adweek (@Adweek) November 6, 2020

Nonetheless, Kulp opined that the AI Logo Maker “may be able to serve as potential inspiration for businesses in the idea phase of their graphic identity.” He further noted that the logo producer “represents the first efforts to leverage the neural network format that has spawned a thriving AI art scene – generative adversarial networks – for enterprise purposes in this way.”

Here at Counselor, I gave Zyro’s logo maker a go. It took literally less than a minute to produce the below logo. To Kulp’s points, it’s not the finished product, but it does provide a foundation off of which to work.

Zyro’s logo generator produced this logo with some basic feedback from me.

From a promotional products perspective, the logo generator – and others that will likely come after – could be helpful to distributors, suppliers and decorators that want to further entrench themselves as consultative marketing partners. They can use the generator, for instance, to help ideate logos and other graphics for end-clients brands and particular promotional initiatives.

Sure, end-clients could use the logo maker themselves for the same purpose, but how many have the time to take the base design and then work something up that’s really to their satisfaction? Some definitely, but not all – and that’s where promo consultants can come in.

The development of more sophisticated AI technology down the line that can incorporate more abstract elements – like brand ethos and mission – into algorithms that then return sophisticated, polished logos and on-brand graphics could present a possible threat to the creative services promo firms and graphic designers provide. Even then, however, designers and promo pros could perhaps leverage the tools to provide better service as part of bigger marketing initiatives.