this is the same neural net I use for the logo generator on brandmark.io - it basically does a visual similarity search on thenounproject to see how much your logo stands out from stock icons.
it's intended to rate the technical/objective aspects of logo design, without judgement on aesthetic/subjective preferences.
Cool! I tried it with our logo (https://www.airbornos.com/images/logo-mark.png), which is super generic (I spent $0 on it). It came up as 96% unique, even though there's two icons of clouds in the list of similar icons. Furthermore, it would be cool if it looked for similarity with a database of other logos as well, and not just icons.
Other small point: maybe you could show the uploaded logo again next to the other logos in the "Color/Contrast" and "Overall" categories, to (probably) drive home the point how bad your logo is in comparison.
Found a minor bug: it seems like if you upload an SVG that it gets internally rendered at a pretty low resolution, I got better results when I converted it to a 512x512 PNG myself and re-uploaded.
Edit: it also should probably mention that it only really works with square logos ;)
I saw this on /r/design last night[1], haven't tried it yet, but based on the comments, it's not as intelligent as advertised. It ranks low the uniqueness of the Nike logo and high a dumb meme.
I'm not complaining, the technology is cool and no doubt it will get to a point that it can critique objectively a logo, but it's not yet here.
maybe that image really is a better logo than nike :]
- on a uniqueness front there are a lot of swooshes, peppers and moustaches that look sort of similar to nike, whereas that image is guaranteed to not have been used for any icon or logo, ever.
- both are fairly legible
- the meme is certainly more colorful and eye-catching
the neural net doesn't really judge the aesthetics of a logo, and it doesn't have any idea what the content of the image is. It just impassively gives you a score based on the similarity to thenounproject icons and a few other parameters.
As I said, I'm not complaining, so don't take it wrong. But that's not a «logo rank», that's an image evaluation. What it should do first is figure out whether it looks like a logo, or not; if it's a simple shape, with few colors, it might be a logo (yes, there are logos with complicated shapes and a lot of colors—the algorithm should decrement its score based on this criteria).
My point is that your tool is very cool, I wish I could do something like that—but that's not a «logo rank», it's a «how unique, legible and eye-catching the image you upload is» rank.
Is the Nike logo really a unique logo purely from a design perspective, or has its extremely strong brand made it a successful logo despite its actual design not being very unique? Whereas a dumb meme is the opposite -- terrible brand, but very unique.
The tool clearly can only look at actual visual design, not branding or any meaning within the image. And in that limited context, it seems successful. I'm not sure it is reasonable to expect it to go beyond a purely visual evaluation of the logo.
Idea is interesting. But it goes off the rails on the Apple logo which is shown as one of the exemplar logos that pops up. Not critical, hopefully some feedback to improve the tool
1) It gives a low uniqueness score because there are fonts include an apple that imitates the apple logo not the other way around. score 30!?!?!
2) black apple on white fields gives a contrast score of 50?? uhmm...
one or two exact-matches doesn't affect the score much. It considers the aggregate similarity of the 150 most similar icons, out of 1M icons. In Apple's case it's mostly because there are a lot of apple icons that look very similar. Apple's logo is iconic because they've built a brand for decades and with billions of dollars. Without that, maybe the shape itself isn't so unique?
the color/contrast score is 50% color and 50% contrast. So a b/w logo will get exactly 50%
I don't feel comfortable commenting on the accuracy since art is somewhat subjective and I am not an artist. Though I realize that many things in art can be measured.
So two logos I paid about $75 each for on Fiverr got 85/100 and 95/100 overall ranking respectfully. Which makes me feel good about the money spent on my logos :)
A logo we spent quite a bit more on from an agency got a 96/100 which is ironic to me because I like the other ones better.
So the rules given are Uniqueness, Legibility, Color/Contrast with a very simplistic description of each which I imagine reflects the rules used. That logo passes with flying colours according to their criteria, perhaps lower marks for legibility. Needless to say, there are more things to logo design than are dreamt of in this philosophy.
There's more about how they use deep learning here:
but for me it seems the constraints they've chosen are ill-conceived (things like matching logo strength to font weight) and unlikely to come up with something inspiring or even decent a lot of the time or rank things well which humans would have no difficulty recognising. This is a difficult problem, and I wouldn't expect rules based solutions to work very well, though some kind of permutation engine starting from known good designs could work better.
I think the Bench logo is confusing. I've never heard of the company before, but the logo looks like it might read "Bench Pi". It's the pi symbol in a shield (although it's so small it's very hard to tell at first glance), so... I'd guess the company has something to do with setting math-based benchmarks as some sort of metric-as-a-service?
[looks at about page]
Okay, no, it's nothing like that at all. The logo gave me the wrong first impression of the company.
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.12.4.min.js. (Reason: CORS header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' missing).
Using Firefox, I uploaded a favicon.ico file (1KB in size) pulled from a website, and the spinner icon has been spinning for a few minutes now. It seems like it doesn't work with Firefox and/or with favicon.ico and/or files that are of that size.
For ease of use, I'd prefer that this page also accept a URL to an image or icon on the Internet.
I tried it with the company logo image pulled from our website[1], which happens to have a bunch of text in it. (It's more like a combination logo+wordmark, I guess)
The circle which should contain the uniqueness metric score was blank[2], even though the script claimed to find 145 similar icons (which aren't at all similar!)
I'm guessing when it stops being useful and/or interesting for the public and for developers. On that basis, I would expect "never" to be a reasonable answer.
64 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadthis is the same neural net I use for the logo generator on brandmark.io - it basically does a visual similarity search on thenounproject to see how much your logo stands out from stock icons.
it's intended to rate the technical/objective aspects of logo design, without judgement on aesthetic/subjective preferences.
let me know what you think!
Other small point: maybe you could show the uploaded logo again next to the other logos in the "Color/Contrast" and "Overall" categories, to (probably) drive home the point how bad your logo is in comparison.
Would it be possible to train using Mechanical Turk so that you get real human feedback and perception of quality?
Found a minor bug: it seems like if you upload an SVG that it gets internally rendered at a pretty low resolution, I got better results when I converted it to a 512x512 PNG myself and re-uploaded.
Edit: it also should probably mention that it only really works with square logos ;)
I'm not complaining, the technology is cool and no doubt it will get to a point that it can critique objectively a logo, but it's not yet here.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/6wz4ho/logo_rank_is...
- on a uniqueness front there are a lot of swooshes, peppers and moustaches that look sort of similar to nike, whereas that image is guaranteed to not have been used for any icon or logo, ever.
- both are fairly legible
- the meme is certainly more colorful and eye-catching
the neural net doesn't really judge the aesthetics of a logo, and it doesn't have any idea what the content of the image is. It just impassively gives you a score based on the similarity to thenounproject icons and a few other parameters.
My point is that your tool is very cool, I wish I could do something like that—but that's not a «logo rank», it's a «how unique, legible and eye-catching the image you upload is» rank.
Is the Nike logo really a unique logo purely from a design perspective, or has its extremely strong brand made it a successful logo despite its actual design not being very unique? Whereas a dumb meme is the opposite -- terrible brand, but very unique.
The tool clearly can only look at actual visual design, not branding or any meaning within the image. And in that limited context, it seems successful. I'm not sure it is reasonable to expect it to go beyond a purely visual evaluation of the logo.
1) It gives a low uniqueness score because there are fonts include an apple that imitates the apple logo not the other way around. score 30!?!?!
2) black apple on white fields gives a contrast score of 50?? uhmm...
the color/contrast score is 50% color and 50% contrast. So a b/w logo will get exactly 50%
I don't feel comfortable commenting on the accuracy since art is somewhat subjective and I am not an artist. Though I realize that many things in art can be measured.
So two logos I paid about $75 each for on Fiverr got 85/100 and 95/100 overall ranking respectfully. Which makes me feel good about the money spent on my logos :)
A logo we spent quite a bit more on from an agency got a 96/100 which is ironic to me because I like the other ones better.
But then I tried a very bad logo ("Kate's Florist" from http://www.paulmurraydesign.com/graphic-design/how-to-spot-a...) and it was ranked almost as good.
There's more about how they use deep learning here:
http://brandmark.io/intro/
but for me it seems the constraints they've chosen are ill-conceived (things like matching logo strength to font weight) and unlikely to come up with something inspiring or even decent a lot of the time or rank things well which humans would have no difficulty recognising. This is a difficult problem, and I wouldn't expect rules based solutions to work very well, though some kind of permutation engine starting from known good designs could work better.
I guess it is a fair assumption that the neural network is trained using a corpus of logos that already look "well made" to the human eye.
It is possible there may not have been any/many samples that would be considered bad.
It would be interesting to see how this neural net evaluates a bad logo, using a tool such as LIME.
[looks at about page]
Okay, no, it's nothing like that at all. The logo gave me the wrong first impression of the company.
rookie mistake
For ease of use, I'd prefer that this page also accept a URL to an image or icon on the Internet.
I tried it with the company logo image pulled from our website[1], which happens to have a bunch of text in it. (It's more like a combination logo+wordmark, I guess)
The circle which should contain the uniqueness metric score was blank[2], even though the script claimed to find 145 similar icons (which aren't at all similar!)
[1] The logo file: http://www.sequentec.co.uk/application/files/3714/2375/7226/...
[2] Screenshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6Wx6pDNYe2_bkVrejFvbFBFSjg...
An unexpected error occurred. Module 'timezonedb' already loaded
Is it keeped ? Deleted ? Used in any way ?
2. Logo.... is .... logo....
3. This tool sucks and steals your time
4. :)
That sucks because I really like it!
Ok, this is weird. The robot by itself gets 100 out of 100.
https://nugget.one/img/logo-robot-only.png
I guess there's still a few kinks to work out.
I haven't really dabbled in AI but my gut feeling is it's quite difficult to make an AI that can match up with human expectations.
Cool.