Ai Logo Environment Study

When you don’t know where to start a project, you usually end up gathering lots of images and videos that inspire you and point you in the right direction. You usually have an artist you admire or a film a studio just released open across a dozen tabs of “research.” The ideas can feel distant. Maybe you like the texture of a metal chair, the strokes of a paintbrush, or the surface of a sculpture. You mood board and hope others see what you see and can follow your lead. Sometimes this works, but more often your team picks up on things you actually don’t like about the reference.

How fast can you take the lighting of a certain room and combine it with the feeling of a sculptor’s marble? The answer: pretty fast.

This test was about finding a way to iterate on the same logo and represent it through different references. How fast can you take the lighting of a certain room and combine it with the feeling of a sculptor’s marble? The answer: pretty fast. All of these test frames are prompted with using a plain black logo file mixed with two image references. One image would be something like a painting or a picture of a gallery space, the other would be a specific piece of art.

Not all of the combinations are worth sharing, and some of the AI results were downright nightmare-inducing. This happened when the reference was too vague or a bit ephemeral, the kind of reference likely to get lost in translation anyway, even from human to human. What this revealed to me is that as designers and directors, we need to be expert communicators. If it doesn’t land with a room full of visual artists, it won’t land with anyone.