Our last blog post covered the basics of how online logo generators work and whether they’re a good fit for you. As an exercise, I’ll walk through using these logo makers to try to recreate the Marketing Stable logo.
The test parameters
For each service, I’m starting with the following information:
- The company’s name Marketing Stable
- I want to use a traditional, professional serif font
- The primary brand color is a forest green
- It would be nice to include a horse
This is a demonstration, so it’s not quite as accurate as being a non-designer starting from scratch. However, most people would start their search with a similar amount of criteria.
Adobe Express
Adobe Express was simple to use, but had very limited customization. There were no font or color options. Instead, step 2 is simplified to “Choose a Style.”
For Marketing Stable, I chose “Elegant” because it had a font similar to what I wanted. But I wouldn’t describe the brand as elegant. Even more confusing, the icon for elegance varied from serifs to scripts, but a script font is also shown under “Decorative.” While this prompt may seem easier than prompting a non-designer to choose a font and color, it made the process more confusing in my experience.
The next step was to choose an icon. It wasn’t clear whether the initial set was related to the business name. Some icons do seem vaguely marketing-related, but at least a third are of government buildings and police badges. Instead, I searched for “horse” and was able to find an icon close to what I wanted.
After three steps, we get the generated logos. The colors immediately stood out to me. There was a lot of dusty pastel pink, which feels abnormal for a marketing company. The color choice is tied to the “Elegant” style I selected earlier. While this doesn’t fit for my case, I can imagine some value in seeing colors you may not have considered yet.
If you click on any logo, you get minimal editing options. The “Color” option doesn’t bring up a color picker like I assumed it would — it simply randomizes the colors within the style you selected. The same is true for fonts. This might be fine for exploring ideas, but editing to a specific logo or font is impossible. (The “Try Adobe Express” button takes me to the Adobe Express homepage, not to more editing options for this logo.)
You can download only 1200×1200 PNG files of the logo. You would lose quality if you ever hoped to print your logo larger than 3-4 inches wide. For me, that’s a massive downside to Adobe Express.
The last major piece of information is hidden in the “Info” button. If you generate a logo with an icon, there’s a vague “Images may be subjected to copyright” disclaimer. I don’t know if the average user would even think to check for this.
In my logo, the icon is not completely free to use and requires attribution to the original artist (cc-by) or a payment of $2.99 to The Noun Project to use the icon without attribution. This isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but hiding the information in a button is confusing at best. If you made a logo for your company with (unintentionally) stolen art, the copyright holder could issue a cease and desist and require you to use a new logo.
Looka
Looka had 7 steps to the quiz compared to Adobe Express’ 3 steps and has more customization options.
In addition to the company name, Looka asks for the industry. Searching “Marketing” gave 6 results. (Wait, what’s the difference between “Marketing Digital” and “Digital Marketing”?) This generates keywords for the symbols later.
The editor also previews how your logo might look on business cards and t-shirts. For $96/year, Looka will generate business cards, email signatures, letterheads, social media posts, and more with the generated logo. If you only need the logo rights and high-resolution files, it’s $65. (There is also a $20 option to download a JPEG, but that’s so limited that you can’t really use that as a logo.)
Logo.com
Logo.com performed similarly to Looka. Enter your company name, select your industry, and select some colors. Each color also had three commonly associated ideas. Unlike the other logo makers, Logo.com prompts you to select a font style. This works well whether you had considered a font already or not. I was able to select the font style I wanted. If you are unfamiliar, there are short descriptions of the type of company each font could fit. And if you’re indecisive, you can select them all.
The closest logo was a horse icon above “Marketing Stable” but the layout options strangely didn’t even include a layout where the horse was to the left. (Most of the layout options didn’t change the layout, and instead added random lines, circles, and squares.)
There are more layout and color options than Adobe Express but less than Looka. Logo.com’s pricing is $12/month with a website builder and “merchandise” included. It sounds similar to the auto-generated designs Looka offers. Interestingly, all the pricing options on Logo.com are subscription-based. There is no option to pay a one-time fee for the logo.
Overall thoughts
Overall, Looka stands out as marginally better than the other logo makers I tried. I was able to get the closest results with Looka and it was easy to use for a beginner.
However, every platform has similar points of friction. I found the customization options frustratingly limited. Each website sources the icons from sites like The Noun Project, so you can never really get a unique logo. And if you test out a few logo makers, it becomes obvious that the logos are based on similar templates.
Ultimately, when the services say they use AI to generate logos, they’re just playing into the current buzz around the novelty and ease of AI. If you’re a small business with minimal budget and you don’t mind a template logo, these are good starter options. If you want a unique logo or have a complex business, these platforms can’t help you yet.
