Creating Corporate Logos with MidJourney: New Jobs for a New Age

Editor’s Note: Perfecting Equilibrium is On Vaca for the next two weeks. We hope you’ll enjoy this post from our archives; new content will resume July 14th.

How bizarre

How bizarre, how bizarre

Destination unknown, as we pull in for some gas

A freshly pasted poster reveals a smile from the past

Welcome to the Perfecting Equilibrium Vlog! This is the second in the series New Jobs for a New Age: Job Two-Creating Corporate Logos with the MidJourney AI Tool. As always, let me know your thoughts on the video; we’re planning to improve! Transcript below, for those who would like to read through. Plus links!

Transcript

Greetings! Welcome to this week's edition of New Jobs for a New Age, from Perfecting Equilibrium, it's our Vlog. I'm Chris Feola, and today we're going to be talking about creating corporate logos with MidJourney. Now, on the first edition of this occasional series, we looked at just creating graphics with DALL-E, and this week we're gonna look at a more specified business application that is creating logos, and then a hopefully adorable mascot.

Now, with any of these, the real point of the series is to show, as we've discussed, that while AIs and these other new tools are creating problems for people who strictly based their jobs on the ability to use creative tools like Adobe, they're creating new jobs at the same time.

And for wordsmiths, the ability to change the outcome radically with one or two words is certainly inviting. So let's get started.

A few years ago when we started Privacy Chain, we didn't have any sort of marketing collateral whatsoever, so I called my old friend Chris Cast. Now Chris is a brilliant designer, worked with him at Belo, worked with him several times since then. He was the creative director for Hawkeye. He's an excellent, excellent high-end designer, just a genius when it comes to this stuff, and I highly recommend him. So we gave him a call.

Here’s a link to his portfolio: Chris Cast Creative. You can always just go and give him a look.

He came and put us through the entire branding process. He talked about who we were and what we were trying to do and what we hope to achieve with Privacy Chain. And he came up with a couple of very good logos that we still use today and we're very happy with them. We're not looking to change them, we're just looking to compare what a professional designer does to what you can generate on your own with MidJourney.

So here are two of the logos that he gave us in that color scheme. It's kind of a Master Lock with PC on it on a circular background. Here's the same thing in a more Master Locky, square-bodied lock. Again, real happy with it, and I'd strongly advise you that if you have the time and the wherewithal to do a serious branding process, do it with Chris.

So, here we go. We're also going to just look at what we can do with these tools, which are kind of the opposite. These tools remind me more of prototyping tools.

Prototyping tools are ways to get quick and dirty results with software without investing in the kind of time and energy that classical software development dev requires. And then that way you don't spend nine months or a year building something and say, well, that was terrible. There's no need for this!

Prototyping tools let you get something out in a couple of days and try it. Then you say wow! That totally doesn't work the way any user wants. So that was a bad idea.

Sometimes it's hard to really understand how an idea's gonna work. You can think about it theoretically, but as the great Yogi Berra said, In theory there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there often is.

Until you get things in users’ hands, you're not sure. So I look at these as prototyping tools, the same way to get quick and dirty results. And you can fail faster that way and learn more and put out a better final product.

So let's jump over to MidJourney, which runs in Discord, which is a community platform. I'll put links, as always, down below, and I will put a transcript of this. And plus I'll put a link to the active transcript, which allows you to zoom directly to specific parts of the video.

So you can see what I did, if you are really wanting to revisit it. And for speed purposes, I have stored this stuff up so I can just cut and paste it in.

So our prompt is a logo design for a cybersecurity company called Privacy Chain. Now, that's all we're gonna give MidJourney at this point, and let her rip, see what it comes up with from there.

Now while MidJourney is thinking about that, hopefully this is a better experience for you. This week I'm using a better camera. I'm using my Sony Xperia Pro-I phone actually, which is built for vlogging.

And I remembered that I had gotten an email a year or so ago from Amazon saying, Hey, buy this cheap tripod and we'll throw in a ring light! And I was like, Oh! I could always use an extra cheap tripod.

So when my fam was beating on me last week about the first video — you look like you have a black eye! Me: It's not a black eye, it's a shadow — and then I thought hey, I wonder where that ring light is? So…I found it, and here we go.

Here are the first results from MidJourney and yeah, kind of interesting. Okay, I'm not sure what that is. It could be interesting and, and weird too. At The same time.

You have some chain around some of these. There's some, some sort of law enforcement look. They're interesting.

Here are a couple of things. Let's say you like number two. You like it the best of these, but you're not sure if that's what you really want. Well, there are two things that you can do under here with these extra buttons that you see down here.

You can upscale it, which means you get a much better-looking version.

I should mention that MidJourney famously ignores type. So it doesn't say Privacy Chain, it says PrrGRRZZZzz — something like that. So there you go.

Anyway you could redo that in Photoshop easily enough, but if you want to do it in Photoshop, you hit this U button, upscale it and get a higher-resolution image for working on it in Photoshop.

The V buttons are for variations. If you really like number two, which I think out of those I do, you can just hit that V and it will give you variations on that particular one. So that you can do some interesting things that way.

And so that's kind of how you can walk through this in an interesting way. You can try variations, you can try upscaling it.

But the important thing we want to talk about today is that you can add more words to that prompt. So this time I'm going to take the same basic prompt, but add the words “minimal vector” on the front, and “white background” on the back, and we'll see how that changes.

So yeah, got the new camera, got the got the ring light going and using a different mic this week. I like the other mic, but I have this audio-technica, which also is pretty good.

And…I think we've gone backwards here. There's some interesting stuff there. I like the dark ones better than the light ones.

Look, the real point of this is it doesn't matter, okay? It's what you like. If you like the light ones…Great! If you like the dark ones…Great! If you don't like any of them, try again. So let's put in more words and see more things that you can do.

So this time we're gonna add the words “Japanese style” to the end and see what it does with that. And we'll take out the white background. It did the white background, but it also made the logos themselves white inside and much lighter. And for whatever reason, I like the darker look.

And again, I can always zap the background out in Photoshop. Part of the way you work with this depends on what skills you have. I'm a photographer by training. And so in Photoshop I can do photography things. I can zap unwanted things out of the background. I can add type, correct the lighting and the color and that kind of stuff.

What I can't do is design, I can't draw new stuff. I mean, if I draw a circle, it looks like a bagel that’s been in some sort of accident

So interesting. I am not sure on some of these, but they certainly are intriguing. Again, it's what you like and what you're interested in. So let's show another variation here just for the sake of it.

I'm going to tell MidJourney to act like it was a famous designer, in this case, Ivan Chermayeff, who designed the Showtime logo, which I'm sure you've seen infinite times.

Now it's a style. So it's kind of like saying write something in a style of Ernest Hemingway. You know, Hemingway wrote the Old Man in the Sea, and most people who try to write like Hemingway write something that would win the Bulwer-Lytton contest. (Edward Bulwer-Lyttonor was the guy who famously started a novel with “It was a dark and stormy night.")

That kind of style can be imitated by MidJourney, So let's set up a prompt and see what it comes out with from there. Well, I think…Wow, how's that song go? How bizarre. I think he would disown that.

You get the general idea. Just change it! No prompt here has been more than 10 or 12 words long. And yet we've gotten radically, radically different results as we scroll through them. Look at all the different results we've gotten here and how different they are from each other. There's so much that can be done here.

So let's do something fun at the end here. Let's do one more. But instead of doing a logo, let's ask MidJourney to “Imagine a cute mascot for a cybersecurity company called Privacy Chain. Now we want it flat. We want a vector graphic and we want it on a white background. So let's see what MidJourney does with that.

Not sure if that's cute or terrifying. Oh, actually these are so cute. I might have to use some of these. This is, yeah, okay. Privacy chain might have a mascot all of a sudden.

All right, that's all for this week. I hope you find these educational or at least inspirational, that you can go on from here and do better than I am with these things. I'm just trying to show you what the possibilities are; you take it from there and make your own dream logos. I hope you have a wonderful week. I hope you'll come back and see us again. Feola out.

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