From the strategic to the mundane. For any new business, you need to come up with a logo. What is amazing with technology today, is that with the help of AI, a new logo can be whipped up in an instant. Right now I am looking at Design.com (found it on a Google Search “AI Logo Free”), and it just asked for the name and some additional inputs (ecommerce, digital marketing, fun…), and then it spit this out:

Literally 10,000 logo options in a few seconds.

I chose “EE” to simplify the logo and make it more iconic. There is no analytical, psychological, strategic approach to this – am just looking for something that speaks to me and somehow gives the essence of what we are trying to achieve here.

Okay, so I thought I had found one, and then tried to download it, only to find a checkout flow. So the process was free, but the end product was not. Nice one! Got to hand it to them, they made the UI very easy and enticing, and now not surprisingly there is an actual payment. $5 per month charged annually, so $60; or an upgraded version with more add-ons (that I don’t need), for $75. Now, being the cost-efficient (cheap) person that I am (hey we are on a tight budget!), I commenced to search for alternative logo creators to see if I can find something better…free-er 🙂

CANVA: this one popped up; I am very familiar with this platform as I have used it many times for creative content creation on emails, site content etc. However, the logo options were limited and ugly. I don’t even know if they charged for the download, as I exited out pretty quickly.

BRANDMARK: this seemed to be a very clean and simple UI (input name and adjectives), and the results were pretty good. I found one that I liked, and then noticed the ‘purchase’ button. This one is $65 one-time fee and with it you get unlimited design changes, source files and other ancillary things. Ultimately, it was hard to pull the trigger on this one because it was so basic. It was just the “EE” letters in a specific font, that I could probably find off the shelf somewhere.

So that brings me back to the original logo that I found (isn’t that often the case? Must be some psychology there). And since the handful of other options seem to also include a fee, I suppose that is the market out there, so I will make the ‘investment’ and pay for the logo. Kudos to the designer platforms out there…they too need to monetize! Note: I welcome your comments if you do know of any truly free AI tools out there that generates logos. Would be helpful for others to know.

All that being said, I made an executive pivot and decided NOT to pay for a logo at this time. Thinking about my comment above about how easy it could be to make a simple logo (at least for now), all I did was grab the “EE” in the title of my blog under “NEED” and created a PNG file, saved it under my drive and uploaded it onto the WordPress platform. Now you can see the “EE” at the very top!

Mind you, there may be some future implications here. If the business does scale, eventually we will need to evolve the logo. My point of view (this is where I would conflict with designers and brand marketers out there) is that we need to move forward for now, and can always change things later. I do not think there will be long term detrimental effects downstream for this decision, so no need to hold us back. I am not a fan of the ‘paralysis by analysis’ camp, and am willing to make quick and decisive decisions, not slow and encumbering ones. So for sure, we will PAY for a logo (whether AI or human), but this is something we can punt towards the future.

This can be a good takeaway for you as you make many, many decisions about your business…some critical, some less so. Experience comes in handy when to know which is which. In my situation, with a blog and content site, the design is probably less critical. If you are creating an apparel company or something where design is more central to the positioning of the brand, then of course, that is worth a healthy exploration. Hope this helps!