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I agree with you. I will say, though, I think DALL-E has opened up a new market for artists. I've gone to freelance graphic designers before, and been generall

I agree with you. I will say, though, I think DALL-E has opened up a new market for artists. I've gone to freelance graphic designers before, and been generally happy with the results, but it's pricey. So pricey that I honestly can't justify it for a new project I intend to sell or for an open source project I don't expect to make money from. It's usually much more cost-effective to even hire lawyers or even UI/UX people. If I were an artist, I'd be experimenting with DALL-E, trying to run my own pirate version and learning everything about it. An artist empowered with DALL-E could give quick options to a client, iterate with them quickly, and test out some ideas before making the final work product. I'd guess a good artist who made good use of DALL-E could get a project done much faster and cheaper, and this would likely mean a lot more people hiring artists (if I could spend $100-200 for high-quality assets within a few days rather than $1000-2000, I'd gladly hire artists frequently). I'm sure this will make some artists feel cheapened, but the reality is that art & technology have always evolved in dynamic and unpredictable ways. ML being essentially curve-fitting means that genuine inspiration and emotion is still far beyond our capabilities today, and that, ultimately, these models will only give us exactly what we ask for. A good (human) artist can go beyond that. EDIT: Also, I agree with your assessment of the "work product," if we can call it that. I was unimpressed with the iterations, and especially the final product. I guess it's good the product is an open source tool. Nothing about the generated logo helped me understand what the OctoSQL tool did. Honestly, the name (which also IMO isn't excellent) is much more evocative than that logo. Why is the octopus wearing a hard hat? Why is it grabbing different colored solids? I guess the solids are datasets? But then the octopus is just exploring them? No thanks.

ric2b 4y ago
It's kinda funny that your main complaint about the final logo is that it doesn't tell you much about what the project does. I can't think of a single well known logo that is even remotely close to what a company's product is. Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, McDonalds, Ford, Ferrari, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel, RedHat, Uber, Github, Duolingo, AirBnB, Slack, Twitter, IntelliJ, Steam. I guess the Gmail logo does tell you it has something to do with mail though, so I did find one example.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  Most of those examples are company logos, and the branding for the company is different than the branding for its products. So whereas Ford's brand is just a name, "Mustang" has a logo that really does tell you something about the car. You kind of understand when you see the galloping horse what it's meant to do. Intel brands its CPUs with the name inside a square, which is colored to resemble (abstractly) a CPU.[0] And Photoshop once had a logo that communicated what it did.[1] As a brand becomes more established, it tends to be more abstract. Whereas Starbucks was once an elaborate siren (I interpreted it to be the siren call of espresso), details have been simplified over the years.[2] This is similar to the Photoshop magnifying glass logo becoming "Ps". After the Apple I and Apple II, Apple sometimes used apple varieties (plus Lisa) to brand it's products (e.g. Macintosh, Newton). However, this largely stopped in the late 90s when Steve Jobs returned. Macintosh was shortened to Mac, and 'i' was prepended to various product names. Most new ones were descriptive e.g. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. The computers have retained "Mac" in the branding, along with "book" for notebooks (a convention predating Steve's return). The logos for all of these are just the names of the products typeset in its own San Francisco font; whenever Apple appears in a product name, the Apple logo is used instead. So, yeah, I think it's reasonable to communicate what a product does or why a project exists with its logo. I didn't really see that w/ OctoSQL. EDIT: I should also address Firefox & Chrome. Firefox started as Phoenix (i.e. rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla). Phoenix had a trademark conflict, so was renamed Firebird. This also had a conflict, and Firefox was chosen after. In the Zeitgeist of the early aughts, Phoenix made a ton of sense: instead of extremely bloated chrome around the page as had been prevalent in Navigator and Internet Explorer, Phoenix gave you a tab bar (truly revolutionary), the navigation bad and the bookmarks bar. It was simple and clean, like a reborn Phoenix. Chrome is interesting because the name is not related to traveling or navigation. It's telling you it's just the container for what you care about. But the logo is a bit more like a sphincter or an all-seeing aperture. I've never gotten the logo for Chrome outside a spyware context, but it has become successful. [0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/processors/core/i5.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro... [1] https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Adobe-Photoshop-Logo-2002-2003.png https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Adobe-Pho... [2] https://miro.medium.com/max/2418/1*tJf7O6FPOmnErngygbBQDQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/2418/1*tJf7O6FPOmnErngygbBQDQ.pn...

ric2b 4y ago

It's kinda funny that your main complaint about the final logo is that it doesn't tell you much about what the project does. I can't think of a single well known logo that is even remotely close to what a company's product is. Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, McDonalds, Ford, Ferrari, Samsung, Nvidia, Intel, RedHat, Uber, Github, Duolingo, AirBnB, Slack, Twitter, IntelliJ, Steam. I guess the Gmail logo does tell you it has something to do with mail though, so I did find one example.

baryphonic 4y ago
Most of those examples are company logos, and the branding for the company is different than the branding for its products. So whereas Ford's brand is just a name, "Mustang" has a logo that really does tell you something about the car. You kind of understand when you see the galloping horse what it's meant to do. Intel brands its CPUs with the name inside a square, which is colored to resemble (abstractly) a CPU.[0] And Photoshop once had a logo that communicated what it did.[1] As a brand becomes more established, it tends to be more abstract. Whereas Starbucks was once an elaborate siren (I interpreted it to be the siren call of espresso), details have been simplified over the years.[2] This is similar to the Photoshop magnifying glass logo becoming "Ps". After the Apple I and Apple II, Apple sometimes used apple varieties (plus Lisa) to brand it's products (e.g. Macintosh, Newton). However, this largely stopped in the late 90s when Steve Jobs returned. Macintosh was shortened to Mac, and 'i' was prepended to various product names. Most new ones were descriptive e.g. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch. The computers have retained "Mac" in the branding, along with "book" for notebooks (a convention predating Steve's return). The logos for all of these are just the names of the products typeset in its own San Francisco font; whenever Apple appears in a product name, the Apple logo is used instead. So, yeah, I think it's reasonable to communicate what a product does or why a project exists with its logo. I didn't really see that w/ OctoSQL. EDIT: I should also address Firefox & Chrome. Firefox started as Phoenix (i.e. rising from the ashes of Netscape Navigator/Mozilla). Phoenix had a trademark conflict, so was renamed Firebird. This also had a conflict, and Firefox was chosen after. In the Zeitgeist of the early aughts, Phoenix made a ton of sense: instead of extremely bloated chrome around the page as had been prevalent in Navigator and Internet Explorer, Phoenix gave you a tab bar (truly revolutionary), the navigation bad and the bookmarks bar. It was simple and clean, like a reborn Phoenix. Chrome is interesting because the name is not related to traveling or navigation. It's telling you it's just the container for what you care about. But the logo is a bit more like a sphincter or an all-seeing aperture. I've never gotten the logo for Chrome outside a spyware context, but it has become successful. [0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/processors/core/i5.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro... [1] https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Adobe-Photoshop-Logo-2002-2003.png https://logos-world.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Adobe-Pho... [2] https://miro.medium.com/max/2418/1*tJf7O6FPOmnErngygbBQDQ.png https://miro.medium.com/max/2418/1*tJf7O6FPOmnErngygbBQDQ.pn...