This tool is pretty good! (This from an inexpert small business person, with no design sense -- but still, that describes a lot of potential users.)
I've been on the other side of the annoying design client experience, playing the role of annoying client. My old law partners and I asked a design firm to do an identity for us, some 7 years ago now. They spent a LOT of time with us, presented numerous concepts, and eventually the only logo we could agree on was a blue circle with our firm name inside of it. Actually it was a pretty good logo, if I do say so myself! But I could tell it was painful for the designers to hold our hands through this process.
The chair of the firm where I started my career liked to talk about the "$300,000 period". The firm had a slogan, something like "We're there for our clients." (minor details changed to protect the guilty) As part of a firm-wide rebranding, they hired an agency to help them update their identity including this slogan. The result was to put a period in the middle, so it became something like "We're there. For our clients." $300k, boom!
I played around with the AI logo creator. It is good as a starting point, if you want an logo that looks more or less like other logos in the training set. I suspect that describes 99% of small business users, so it's perfect! Just provide a MOO integration and you'll turn $15k/mo into $100k.
I would be interested to see the tool opened up, so you could do logos with arbitrary training data -- but with some hard constraints imposed by the user so it's not just a sea of pornographic aliens cavorting on Dali-inspired worlds. (edit: unless that's what you're going for, of course)
At the end of the day, what justifies a big agency fee is partly just the ability to make high-ego corporate clients feel good about their decisions, and to help them sell those decisions within their political environment.
I've been on the other side of the annoying design client experience, playing the role of annoying client. My old law partners and I asked a design firm to do an identity for us, some 7 years ago now. They spent a LOT of time with us, presented numerous concepts, and eventually the only logo we could agree on was a blue circle with our firm name inside of it. Actually it was a pretty good logo, if I do say so myself! But I could tell it was painful for the designers to hold our hands through this process.
The chair of the firm where I started my career liked to talk about the "$300,000 period". The firm had a slogan, something like "We're there for our clients." (minor details changed to protect the guilty) As part of a firm-wide rebranding, they hired an agency to help them update their identity including this slogan. The result was to put a period in the middle, so it became something like "We're there. For our clients." $300k, boom!
I played around with the AI logo creator. It is good as a starting point, if you want an logo that looks more or less like other logos in the training set. I suspect that describes 99% of small business users, so it's perfect! Just provide a MOO integration and you'll turn $15k/mo into $100k.
I would be interested to see the tool opened up, so you could do logos with arbitrary training data -- but with some hard constraints imposed by the user so it's not just a sea of pornographic aliens cavorting on Dali-inspired worlds. (edit: unless that's what you're going for, of course)
At the end of the day, what justifies a big agency fee is partly just the ability to make high-ego corporate clients feel good about their decisions, and to help them sell those decisions within their political environment.