Do you use AI for logos? Why I deliberately don't

These days you can generate a logo with AI in a few seconds. Type in a few words, and out rolls a mark. Fast, cheap, and for some purposes maybe even good enough. But I deliberately don't use it to come up with logos, and that's not an accidental choice.

A good logo doesn't start with a prompt. It starts with a conversation: what do you want to express, who is it for, what makes your business different from the rest. An AI doesn't know any of that — it only recognises patterns from thousands of existing logos and stitches together a variation. The result often looks fine on the surface, but it's rarely truly yours. Chances are another company has something similar somewhere.

For me, every logo starts with paper and a pencil. That sounds old-fashioned, but it forces me to think before I commit to anything. I sketch multiple directions, discard the weak ones, and work out the strongest one digitally — line by line, until the proportions are right. That process takes time. An AI tool can't replace that, because the whole point of the process is that someone is paying attention and making choices.

That doesn't mean I avoid AI altogether. For internal things — admin, quickly looking something up, checking a piece of text — I use it just like anyone else. But coming up with your logo, the thing your business needs to stand out with? That stays human work. Pencil, paper, and only then a screen.

So if you have a logo made with me: no AI-generated result, but a design that's been thought through from the very first sketch.