Why AI logos look like AI (and how to fix it)
Gradients, glow and fake letters give it away. Here's what I changed in my prompts to get logos that look like a designer made them.
I spent most of last month trying to get a decent logo out of image models for a friend's bakery. The first twenty attempts were, honestly, embarrassing. Shiny croissants. Letters that almost spelled the name. A glow around everything, like the logo was radioactive.
So what's actually going on?
The model is copying what's popular, not what's good
Most images these tools learned from are polished mockups and stock graphics. That's why you get gradients and 3D by default. A real designer usually does the opposite: they strip things away until only the idea is left.
Three changes that helped
Say what you don't want. "No gradients, no glow, no 3D, no drop shadow" did more than any fancy adjective.
Ask for the idea first. I started asking for three written concepts before any image. It forces the model to think about the business instead of decorating.
Spell the name out, in quotes. And keep it short. Long names still break sometimes, so I often add the text myself afterwards in Figma.
Keep it to two colours
If it doesn't work in black on white, colour won't save it. That's an old rule and it still holds.
The bakery ended up with a simple wheat stalk folded into the letter B. Took ten minutes once the prompt was right. Our [logo prompt](/prompts/human-designed-logo) is basically what I ended up using.