How AI Is Accelerating Logo Design

Jan 5th, 2025, by Kam Kaiserman

How AI Is Accelerating Logo Design

A practical guide to a new design workflow that can empower designers to accomplish what once required entire departments.

The Capacity Revolution: From Tool To Collaborator

Designers are experiencing a fundamental shift with AI. As I’ve discussed with friends and colleagues, it’s been clear their fear of being replaced or the pressure to create faster, better, stronger is consistent across industries and individuals. Designers must keep up with AI developments in order to stay relevant but we’re caught in a sea of new programs and increasing demands, failing to know what programs to pick and how to adapt our workflows.

However, instead of replacing designers, correct AI use is showcasing that both high level designers and small teams can accomplish what once required entire departments. The real advantage lies in understanding how to integrate AI programs strategically into personal creative workflows. This shift represents a mindset shift from “AI can make images” or even “AI will replace me” to “AI can extend my creative reach across every phase of the design process.”

With AI integration, that same designer who now spends three weeks exploring thirty concepts can expand their work to only curation and refinement by having AI handle the grunt work for most jobs while designers add the human touch. As of Jan 2026, AI can successfully generate rough drafts of logos, organize file structures, and handle the initial prototyping of websites and apps, as well as many developments to come.

As designers stay updated on the rapid changes of Tech, they can continue to streamline their process with minimal training.

Rapid Concepting and Mood Boards

Designers are using AI to generate dozens of visual directions in minutes. While the results are often haphazard, “rolling the dice” as AI users have coined, knowing how to speak to AI is all that’s needed to generate the beginning stages of a design.

At Zion Forge, we needed to prototype the logo for Maverick, an airsoft ammo company. We began by pitching ideas and general directions whether that be a logo made of lines, geometric designs, a bird or bull icon, or a letterform.

During the prototyping stage, we generated over 500 concepts within two hours but many were too complex or the theming was off. Often, designs were stale or similarly corporate in style. But with so many concept directions, we were able to accelerate internal discussions and establish a general direction for the project with stakeholders, quickly moving the process to the refinement stage in days instead of weeks.

After a stakeholder meeting we were able to showcase the 11 best concepts and then select the bird designs to refine.

After an hour or so of refinement we finalized an eagle logo design that was composed of one structured outline with added type for the company name.

Final Maverick Design

Limitations & The Grit

A few issues designers might run into could be:

Understanding prompts and what AI can actually achieve.
Drowning in the endless options (losing instead of gaining back time)
Using AI tools but failing to select the best tool for their task.

AI can be useful for general logos, but it consistently fails to comprehend complex concepts through prompting like a negative space logo with multiple meanings. It also struggles with typography and can’t utilize established fonts. ChatGPT and similar chatbots often fail at image generation tasks or create muddy or inaccurate designs. The most accessible, ready made tool for image generation today is Midjourney.

Copyright issues may arise as new regulations are passed across the world and it remains vital to only use AI for concept generation that can then be adapted enough to curb any infringement concerns.

My stack currently consists of:

Working with Claude.AI and ChatGPT to generate a prompt
Selecting a generated prompt for Midjourney
Generating options with Midjourney
Taking the best options into Adobe programs for refinement

A logo design of a silhouette of a mountain peak with a negative space bear looking up at the moon, professional graphic design, vector, black and white color.

The above handwritten prompt generated mediocre results. The bear is only in negative space in one option and blends poorly into the mountain outline. After asking Claude.AI to create prompts for Midjourney based on my original, it generated the following prompt,

“negative space logo design, mountain peak silhouette with bear looking up at moon hidden in negative space, minimalist, professional graphic design, vector art style, black and white, clean lines, clever use of negative space, flat design, simple shapes, corporate branding style”

After two attempts or “rolls”, Midjourney began to generate concepts that included some negative space but were often too complicated and needed to be simplified or multiple concepts combined by a human.

Although you can keep refining prompts, there’s no way to tell how long it may take to achieve the exact desired results. For now, these more complex concepts are best left to the human hand.

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Though we don’t know what AI will actually achieve in the coming years, for now, only specific, generalist tasks are helped through AI use. While your typical start-up may be vastly accelerated and use designs straight from AI, larger companies can still benefit from the rapid prototyping process to ensure team alignment. Through rapid prototyping and idea generation, human designers can take those generated prototypes and give clarity to their teams and stakeholders.

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