AI and Branding: a creative revolution or a limited tool?

Today, artificial intelligence is advancing at an incredible pace and is making its way into the field of design, offering online tools and extensions integrated into leading software such as Figma and the Adobe Suite. These solutions help optimize designers’ work by automating certain tasks, speeding up creative processes, and providing new creative perspectives and options for businesses. But how far can they really go?

Ready-to-use tools: how effective are AI logo generators?

Online solutions like Canva’s DreamLab, LogoAI.com, and Design.com promise to generate AI-powered logo proposals in just seconds, based on a simple prompt. With user-friendly and accessible interfaces, these tools attract entrepreneurs, marketing and communication specialists, and small businesses looking for a fast and affordable visual identity. But how do these tools compare to real artistic direction?

To find out, we tested and compared these three solutions using a specific methodology. We decided to submit the same brief to each of them, using the well-known identity of Deezer, a music streaming company, as our reference.

Methodology

We used Deezer’s official brand guidelines, available online, as the basis for two types of briefs:

A short and broad brief: allowing room for interpretation

We deliberately created a simple and open-ended brief to assess how each AI tool interprets a broad and minimally detailed request:

• Company: Music streaming platform – Deezer.

• Values: Connection, self-expression, dynamism.

Slogan : "Live the music."

A detailed and precise brief: a structured approach

For this second test, we developed a much more structured brief to provide clear and technical guidelines that the AI had to follow:

• Company Name: Deezer.

• Slogan: "Live the music".

• Industry: Music streaming.

• Logo: Minimalist, dynamic, and expressive. It should reflect the emotion and energy of music, incorporating curved and fluid shapes that evoke the movement of sound and the connection between the artist and the listener—without using obvious musical symbols.

• Typography: Expressive and contemporary sans-serif.

Analysis of the results: practical tools, but still far from convincing

As expected, the results fall far short of what one would expect from human artistic direction.

• Limited conceptual interpretation: even with a detailed brief, AI tools struggle to capture the emotion and artistic vision that a human could bring to a client.

• Standardized designs: the generated proposals often lack originality and personalization, relying on pre-existing libraries, which makes the results less distinctive.

• Reliance on visual clichés: when given a broad brief, AI tends to use obvious symbols (e.g., musical notes) rather than seeking a more subtle and innovative interpretation.

• Outdated designs: the results often feel disconnected from current trends, giving an unprofessional and low-end impression.

Can AI be hacked to achieve better results?

If AI has yet to reach the level of a human artistic director, can its use be optimized to get the most out of it?

In an article by La Boucle, the media team tested several AI tools to recreate their branding, yielding interesting results. The goal was to understand how to "hack" AI tools to enhance their often too-generic or limited proposals.

The experiment was conducted using ChatGPT and Midjourney, based on a precise brief:

"Imagine you are the Senior Brand Manager and Artistic Director of La Boucle. La Boucle has an editorial positioning and covers seven themes related to digital: strategy, UX and UI, branding, web marketing, websites and applications, and eco-design. The target audience is urban, aged between 20 and 35, and follows media such as J’ai un pote dans la com, L’ADN, Creapills, or Medium. The tone is expert yet human, slightly cynical and sarcastic, with a sharp wit."

Based on this brief, the requested elements included color palettes and typography generated via ChatGPT, and a mascot created with Midjourney. After a few iterations and a creative eye for assembly, the result was surprisingly solid. Of course, the outcome could be even more refined by multiplying prompts, increasing iterations, and analyzing new data sets, but that was not the goal of this experiment.

In conclusion, the article emphasizes that AI remains an excellent assistance tool, but its capabilities cannot replace deep human reflection. While AI can accelerate the creative process, it must always be used critically and integrated with a strategic vision for brands.

Simply put: AI can be "hacked," but it must always be guided by human expertise to create strong, distinctive branding.

AI tools relevant to visual identity creation

While artificial intelligence is not yet capable of fully replacing a creative director’s expertise, it has become a powerful tool for supporting the development of a company’s visual identity. From selecting typography and color palettes to photography and mood board creation, certain AI functionalities help accelerate the iterative process and refine a high-quality artistic direction for clients.

Typography

• WhatTheFont – Identify a Typeface from an Image

WhatTheFont scans an image (logo, poster) and identifies the typeface used from a vast database.

• Ideal for: Finding an existing typeface and ensuring visual consistency.

• Fontjoy – Find Harmonious Font Combinations

Fontjoy uses AI to pair complementary fonts suited for various applications.

• Ideal for: Selecting modern typefaces and adapting them to branding.

Color Palette

• Adobe Color CC – Define and Adjust a Color Palette

Adobe Color extracts color palettes from images and optimizes them with accessibility tools.

• Ideal for: capturing a color atmosphere and harmonizing colors based on a logo or visual identity.

Iconography

• Adobe Firefly & MidJourney – Image and Moodboard Generation

Adobe Firefly and MidJourney enable the creation of custom visuals based on textual descriptions.

• Ideal for: generating cohesive moodboards and testing visual concepts before approval. MidJourney produces visuals in various styles, making it perfect for quickly exploring creative directions or establishing the foundation of a visual identity.

Source : onlinemarketing.de

AI remains an assistant: it provides suggestions, but ultimately, it is always the human eye that validates, refines, and gives meaning to brand design. The challenge for designers and brands is to learn how to work intelligently with these tools, integrating them into a hybrid creative process where technology, strategy, and human creativity complement each other to produce strong and unique brand identities.

Two major limitations of AI in branding

AI allows for refining, testing, and exploring endless variations of a visual identity, but it remains a support tool—not a turnkey solution. Behind a strong brand lies a vision, experience, a marketing concept, intent, content, and strategy—areas where human expertise remains essential.

Lack of sensitivity and depth

AI and Generative AI apply a brief literally, but without the nuance and experience that bring true personality to a brand. Building a brand image (on the web and/or social platforms like LinkedIn) is not just about assembling colors and shapes—it requires a deep understanding of a company’s values, history, and market positioning in the eyes of professionals and clients.

Moreover, even clients often struggle to precisely articulate the emotions and essence of their brand. This introspective phase—"Who is my brand?"—forms the foundation of branding. No algorithm can replace this strategic and human effort, which is essential for building a strong and coherent identity.

Lack of consistency and impact

Despite its progress, AI still produces visual inconsistencies and lacks differentiation for professionals. Drawing from existing databases, it recycles rather than creates, often generating generic and formulaic results, far from true personalization.

The risk? A homogenization of brand identities, where logos and visuals look more alike than they stand out.

This is where the role of the brand designer remains crucial:

• Providing a unique vision to avoid interchangeable branding.

• Creating an identity that transcends trends and expresses a brand’s singularity.

• Ensuring consistent branding across all communication channels.

• Designing distinctive and impactful content.

• Guaranteeing meaningful and coherent brand personalization.

In short, AI can accelerate creation, but only human expertise can infuse meaning, emotion, and uniqueness. A strong brand is not just a logo or a color palette—it tells a story and fosters a high-quality emotional connection, a role that AI and Generative AI will never fully assume, whether in content or graphic elements.

Conclusion 

Artificial intelligence is advancing at an astonishing pace, providing art directors and brand designers with powerful tools for creating high-quality visual identities. By facilitating idea exploration and accelerating iterations with clients, AI enables the refinement of concepts more quickly, offers multiple options, and leads to more precise and well-defined visual identities.

However, this evolution does not mark the end of the creative role—quite the opposite. The strategy and creation of brand imagery are undergoing a transformation.

In a world where visuals risk becoming standardized due to widespread AI use, the added value of marketers, businesses, and designers lies more than ever in their ability to bring vision, sensitivity, creativity, and strong strategic direction to brands.

The future of design will be neither entirely human nor fully automated. It will rely on an intelligent collaboration between AI and creatives, where technology enhances execution while humans shape the brand’s vision. The evolving role of art directors and brand designers will depend on leveraging AI as an innovation driver while reinforcing their position as orchestrators of meaning, personalization, and emotion across various formats—from print to web and social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Behance, Dribbble, and LinkedIn.