It's the question we hear more than any other right now. Usually with a slightly guilty look.
“Couldn’t I just get AI to do it?”
Fair question. You can type a prompt and get fifty logos before your coffee’s gone cold. So why would anyone still pay a designer?
We’ve been doing this since 2008, and we use AI every day. So here’s our honest take: what it’s brilliant at, where it falls flat, and how to get the best of both.
Credit where it's due
Let’s not pretend AI is rubbish. It isn’t. It’s genuinely good at:
• Volume. Dozens of ideas in seconds. Great for getting unstuck.
• Speed. Mock-ups, image edits and first drafts that used to take hours now take minutes.
• The boring bits. Resizing, background removal, copy variations, social crops.
• Exploring. “What if it was blue? What if it was hand-drawn?” You can test a hundred directions cheaply.
If you need a placeholder logo for a side project this weekend, AI will do the job. Honestly.
Where it falls flat
A brand isn’t a picture. It’s a decision about who you are, who you’re for and why anyone should care. That’s where AI runs out of road.
It doesn’t know your business. It hasn’t sat with you, met your customers or clocked what your competitors are doing. It designs for the prompt, not the problem.
It makes average on purpose. AI is built from what already exists, so it drifts towards what already exists. Fine if you want to blend in. Useless if you need to stand out.
It can’t tell good from great. It’ll hand you fifty options with total confidence. It won’t tell you that forty-eight of them say the wrong thing.
It doesn’t own anything. If the logo’s unreadable on a van, clashes with a competitor or can’t be trademarked, AI isn’t picking up the phone. A designer is.
It stops at the logo. A brand is the logo, the colours, the type, the tone of voice and how it all works on your website, your packaging and your socials. Stitching that together is the actual job.
Fifty logos isn't the hard part
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud. Making options was never the expensive bit. Knowing which one is right, and why, is.
That comes from taste. From asking awkward questions in the first call. From seeing hundreds of brands succeed and fail and knowing the difference. From saying “no, not that one” when you’re secretly in love with it.
AI hands you a bigger pile. A good designer hands you the answer.
So how do we use it?
Every day. Just not for the thinking.
AI speeds up the parts of a project that don’t need judgement: research, early mood boards, mock-ups, resizing, first drafts of copy. That frees us up for the part that matters: understanding your business and making the calls that make your brand work.
The result? You get the speed of the new tools and the judgement of someone who’s been doing this for 18 years. Faster projects, sharper work, no corners cut.
So, should you use AI?
It depends what you’re building.
• Testing an idea or a weekend side project? Go for it. AI is quick, cheap and good enough.
• Building a business you want people to trust, remember and pay for? That’s worth getting right. Your brand will be on everything you do for years.
And if you’ve already made something with AI and it’s nearly there? Bring it to us. We’re happy to take it from “nearly” to nothing ordinary.
Got a project
in mind?
Book a Call
Let’s make something worth staring at.
