AI won't design your brand. It will make the bad ones cheaper.

Type "minimalist logo for a bakery, gold, elegant" into an image generator and ten seconds later you have twelve of them. They look fine. Some look better than fine. A question we now get weekly: why would anyone pay a studio for a logo?

Because a logo is not a brand, and a picture is not a logo. Here is the difference, and where the new tools actually belong.

A logo is a decision, not a picture

The mark on your door has to work at 16 pixels in a browser tab and on a van. It has to survive black-and-white, a dark background, embroidery, a stamp. It needs a wordmark that matches, a colour that reproduces the same on a phone and on paper, and a set of rules so that the person who makes your Instagram posts in two years does not slowly turn it into something else.

None of that is in the picture. The picture is the easy ten percent. The generators are very good at the easy ten percent.

What a brand is

The consistent feeling a customer has across every contact: the sign, the site, the invoice, the reply to a complaint, the way the van is parked. Design gives that feeling a shape — typography, colour, tone, the way things are laid out — and then discipline keeps it the same everywhere. A brand is a set of decisions, kept. You cannot generate discipline.

The tell

Generated logos share a look, and the look is already recognisable: a symmetrical mark, a serif wordmark, gold on dark, a small flourish. It is the "we asked a machine" style, and it is spreading fast. Within a year it will read the way a template did — a sign that nobody decided anything.

Where the tools genuinely help

We use them, daily:

• Exploring. Two hundred rough directions in an hour, to find the three worth drawing properly. This used to take a week of sketching.
• Mood and reference. Showing a client "warmer, more like this" without searching stock sites for an afternoon.
• Placeholders. Imagery for a layout before the real photography exists.
• Variations of a finished system. Once the rules exist, generating on-brand social graphics gets faster.

In every case a designer decides, draws the final mark by hand, tests it in every size and place it will live, and writes the rules. The machine speeds up the search. It does not make the decision.

What this means for prices

The bottom of the market will get cheaper and worse. A €50 logo will become a €5 logo, and it will look like every other €5 logo. The value of a considered identity — one that is clearly yours, works everywhere, and holds together for a decade — goes up, because it becomes rarer. That is the work we do, and the tools have made us faster at it, not replaceable by it.

If you already generated a logo you like: keep it as a sketch. Bring it to someone who will ask what it has to do, and let them finish the other ninety percent.