Few things are as exciting or as daunting in business as creating a visual identity and logo for your brand.
Our mission at AiRE before RiTA’s first birthday (2018) was to reimagine her visual identity with new logos and creative design for both AiRE and RiTA. It was daunting; what to get a robot for her first birthday? We like to walk our talk here at AiRE so we wondered if Ai could help.
At first, we thought, “no way!”. As the recipient of hundreds of hour of tutelage in fine art (a fact that is true), being ‘creative’, I thought, was the exclusive domain of the human artist.
Then, theoretically, I started to think about everything I had learned in art about proportion, dimension, line, colour, shade. All of that technical execution ‘stuff’ is teachable and probably could be learned, maybe one of Rita’s cousins?
In fact, in 2018 the first piece of Fine Art was created by an Ai research firm called ‘Obvious’ using methods called GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). Obvious created an algorithm to produce a portrait of a fictional historical character named Edmond Bellamy. The piece, pictured below, was signed by the algorithm used to create it and sold at Christie’s Fine Art Auction in 2018 for $432,500 – which was 45 times its high estimate.
Ai generated a portrait of the fictional Edmond Bellamy by Obvious. Using Ai techniques known as GAN – the portrait is signed by the algorithm that created it.
If Ai could produce fine art, it must be able to help us with at least some inspiration for our new creative development. All you would have to do, I supposed, was tell the software what the logo was for, maybe choose a few designs to guide an algorithm towards your taste and viola, in theory, we should have a result. Theoretically, that is what I thought.
In the same week that physicists theoretically proved that time travel exists (meaning the math is real, but the technology to build the machine isn’t,) I was hopeful that someone clever may have explored Ai and logo design using mathematical algorithms. So I hit up Google with hope and it delivered.
Looka.com is an Ai powered logo generator that asks a few questions about your business or project and then creates a stream of logo suggestions for you, based on those parameters.
It is free to play around and around $70AUD to finalise the design, including everything you would expect to receive from a designer including high res files in multiple formats, colour variations, style guidelines and even a social media kit.
We did put the Ai at Looka.com to the test to see what alternatives the platform created for Rita. Here is what happened:
Here is what Rita looked like August 2017 – August 2018:
Here are the suggestions from the Ai powered algorithms at Looka.com:
An awesome start, but not the end of the story. We believe that the best outcomes of the robot-human workforce are when machine and human intelligence work together. So we hit up an extremely talented Brisbane graphic designer, Lousie Croizier from https://www.louisecrozier.com/ to bring this Ai powered inspiration to life.
And here is where we landed and we couldn’t be happier.
