AI has made the most expensive and slowest part of logo design almost free: idea generation.
A designer usually presents three to five directions because each takes hours. With Ideogram you can see thirty in the same time, which makes deciding on a direction radically easier.
But there is a limit: AI produces a logo idea, not a usable logo file. The rest of this guide is about that gap and how to cross it.
Stage 1: Thirty directions
Start by describing the brand in one sentence: what you do, who you serve and the feeling you want. "Third-wave coffee shop, young urban customers, warm and handmade" is a much better starting point than a prompt.
In Ideogram, put the brand name in quotes and describe the style by technique. Run the same prompt in three styles — minimal geometric, handwritten, badge — and produce around thirty directions.
Do not choose at this stage, only generate. Choosing early means missing a better direction you never saw.
Constraints like "flat vector, two colours, no gradient, no shadow, white background" are mandatory. Without them, models produce shadowed, gradient-filled and unusable output.
Stage 2: Moving to vector
What these tools produce is made of pixels. A logo has to be a vector: mathematically defined shapes stay sharp at every size, can have their colours changed and can be converted to single-colour print.
Print a pixel logo on a sign and it comes out blurry. Shrink it to favicon size and the details collide. Preparing a brand guideline, you cannot produce the colour variations.
Two routes. Regenerate your chosen direction in Recraft — the one common tool that outputs SVG directly. Or have a designer redraw the idea as a vector.
The second route costs more but is legally sounder if a trademark is planned; the next section explains why.
If you are planning a trademark
Using fully AI-generated output as a logo carries two separate risks.
The first is copyright: in many countries, works without human creative input cannot be copyrighted. You can use your logo, but the legal ground for stopping someone else using the same mark is weaker.
The second is similarity: because models are trained on existing imagery, the chance your logo resembles a registered mark is not zero. Running a similarity search before filing matters even more here.
The defensible route: use AI at the idea stage, have a human produce the final drawing, and document that process. That gives human creative contribution and a record of how it happened.
Five checks before you ship
At the point where the logo feels finished, run these five checks. Each takes minutes and catches mistakes that are expensive later.
- Shrink to 16 pixels: is it still recognisable?
- Convert to a single colour: does the form hold?
- Reverse image search: does it resemble an existing mark?
- Is there a vector file? Without one it cannot go on signage.
- Are horizontal and square variants ready? You will need both.
Frequently asked questions
Can I make a logo with AI for free?
The idea-generation stage can be done free: Ideogram's daily allowance covers dozens of directions and asks for no card. The point where you need to pay is converting your chosen draft to vector — Recraft limits vector export on its free tier.
Which tool is best for logos?
Ideogram for generating ideas and rendering the brand name correctly. Recraft for turning the chosen idea into a usable vector file. Using them in sequence gives markedly better results than one tool alone.
Can I trademark an AI-generated logo?
You can file, but a fully AI-generated mark cannot be copyrighted, which weakens your protection against third parties. The safe route is using AI at the idea stage and having a designer produce the final drawing.