HAS AI BECOME THE MODERN STOCK IMAGE?
Brand design has become simplified over recent years with the rise and rise of social media. With social media came content creation. Content creation and the demand for eyeball catching content gave birth to design apps and software. Gone are the days of navigating Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Less we forget Mac lovers; Corel Draw.
Canva, Adobe spark, Pixlr have all entered the chat. With software and apps available for free, it is almost impossible to produce ugly brand content. Bold templates, beautiful fonts and easy to use programs have made content creation and design accessible for all.While technology has made the brand content design process easier, it has not removed the need for brand designers and graphic designers to create brands and brand designs.
There are numerous AI logo producing software. However, at this stage, the designs produced are still generic and at often times irrelevant to the product and the brand.
What brand designers understand is something that brand design goes beyond a physical logo. No matter how good the logo looks.
Brand design is the creation of the look and feel of the culture and the attitude and ethos of a brand. It is about creating standards in not just marketing assets like websites and Instagram pages. Good brand designers ( well we do) start with ideas and concepts, not just a mood board from Pinterest. Good brand designers start by translating how their clients want their brand to by how they want their products to be conveyed to their target market. Good brand designers will start trying to understand the culture, the people, the products and the markets. Where the brand will be accessed and how it could be viewed.
Through this process, brand designers will go through various stages of ideation, which they will carefully think through and challenge. Nomenclature, typology and colour is just the starting point of this process that AI can produce. Good brand designers will go beyond this to translate to whom it should appeal to and why and go through the process of elimination as to why their concepts and or concepts work and where is the appeal. There is a structure to the process, it is not just about the design. If it was easy everyone could do it. Without AI.
A lot of startups and new enterprises set out to avoid the hassle of hiring brand designers in the belief that all they require is a logo and a business card opting for AI-generated logos or simply thinking they “just need a graphic designer”. This often leads to a poorly thought through logo and brand story then resulting in poor first impressions. And that for now is simply why AI has not yet killed the profession of brand design.