Comparison of brand visual AI design tools

I have helped several entrepreneurial friends do brand vision, from logo to packaging to complete materials. I have experienced the transformation process from traditional design to AI design. This article doesn't talk about the fake data with a "comprehensive score of 8.5/10". It just talks about what surprised me after I actually used these tools, what I stepped into, and how I would recommend it to different friends now.

Let's start with a basic understanding: AI tools can currently work at a higher level than you think, but they are still far from "fully automated things." By recognizing this, the tools behind the conversation will not take detours.

The underlying logic of recommending tools to my friends

Before talking about specific tools, let's talk about how I recommend them to others. I usually ask three questions:

what stage are you at now? Is it just a person who just started a business, or is there already dozens of people in the team? Second, what exactly do you need to do? Just a logo or a complete set of VI? Or is packaging the core? Third, do you have any design aesthetics? It's not that you have to understand designing software, but that you can tell "which one looks better."

The answers to these three questions basically determine what tool I promote.

Dedicated brand design tools: Looka and Brandmark

Talk about these two first, because they are the easiest to get started-enter the brand name, choose the style, it gives you a bunch of logos, you pick one and pay.

I used Looka to make one for a friend who owns a cafe. The process is really simple enough to say: Enter "Coffee Path", select a few favorite style references, and it generates about dozens of solutions. Pick a direction, and it automatically helps you match the brand color and font, and also generates renderings of business cards and doors.

The advantage is that it is really worry-free. You don't need any design knowledge, and the whole process can get a basic and usable brand vision in about an hour. The generated brand specification document can be directly thrown to the production company and told them to "follow this", saving a lot of communication costs.

But the problem is also obvious. There is the upper limit of creativity, and you can tell that the things generated are "template"-not saying anything wrong, but there is no memory point. And once you want to change something, such as "I want to change the angle of this graphic," its editing capabilities are relatively limited, and many times you can only recreate it and take your luck.

Brandmark's experience is similar to that of Looka. The reason why I recommend Looka is that its mock up (scene renderings) is more complete and it is more intuitive when showing the plan to friends.

My suggestion: If you just need a basic brand vision that can be seen, don't want to spend too much time, and don't plan to do too well in brand design, Looka or Brandmark is enough. But if you want something with a little personality, you have to go down.

Recraft AI: Vector this piece is really strong

Capture is one of the most commonly used tools I currently use when doing logo design.

What impressed me was its vector generation capabilities. Most of the things generated by AI tools are bitmaps, which will be blurred when zoomed in, or people will not be able to use them when given to the production company. The vector diagram generated by Capture is truly usable-the nodes are clean, the paths are clear, and can be imported directly into Illustrator for editing.

Another thing that impressed me was the consistency of style. If you let it generate a set of icons or a set of visual elements, it can keep the same style going through. This consistency is particularly important for brand design, because what brand vision is most afraid of is that "everything can be seen individually, but put together, it will not be the same brand."

But it also has limitations. When it comes to packaging design, Capture's performance is average, especially its capabilities related to product rendering and perspective, which is not as good as Nano Banana as will be mentioned later. Moreover, it is slightly more templated. If you need a unique design direction, sometimes you have to adjust the prompt words repeatedly to get out of the "Capture flavor."

My suggestion: If your core needs are logos and vector graphics, Capture should be the first choice. But don't expect it to do everything in one go.

Nano Banana (Gemini): Surprises in packaging design

Let's talk about packaging first, because this is the part that impressed me the most.

I have a friend who made a handmade chocolate, but he had asked a designer to make two versions of packaging design before, but he was not satisfied with it. I tried it with Nano Banana, and it generated about seven or eight plans. Finally, he picked a natural illustration style one, slightly adjusted the color, and directly used it for proofing. The effect is better than the previous two editions, and the cost is almost negligible.

Nano Banana has several advantages in packaging: it has a better understanding of natural language and visual details. If you tell it,"light-colored, watercolor texture, botanical, high-end but not luxurious," it can really get to that direction. It is also very convenient to modify. Frame an area and directly say "Change this leaf into a berry." It will be changed while maintaining the overall composition.

When making a logo, Nano Banana will also work, but I usually cross-verify it with other tools-that is, I go to Nano Banana in several directions, then go to Capture to try different styles, and finally choose one.

It should be noted that what Nano Banana generates is not necessarily a vector directly, and it still has to be rotated again when it finally lands. In addition, its generation speed is fast, but this also means that it produces a large number of solutions, and the cost of screening becomes higher. I usually generate multiple rounds at a time, and pick the best direction for each round and deepen it, instead of asking it to come up with a hundred plans and then I pick slowly.

Midjourney: Easy to use but not commercial directly

The role I use in Midjourney in brand design is quite special-I only use it in the early stage of style exploration and won't directly use its drawings to make finished products.

The reason is copyright. The copyright ownership of the pictures generated by Midjourney has always been vague. For a core asset such as a brand logo, registering with a picture whose copyright source is unclear is too risky. You may not care when you first started out, but if you get bigger in the future, this problem may come back to you.

But Midjourney is really top notch when it comes to "feeling". During the brand strategy stage, I often use it to quickly generate visual reference maps of various styles-"What do I want the brand vision of this texture to look like?"-which is much more efficient than on Pinterest one by one.

Canva AI: The underrated role

Some people may think that Canva is not popular, but I find that it actually has its place in the brand materials field.

Its Magic Design function allows you to throw in a logo and one or two product drawings. It can help you quickly generate social media posts, simple promotional pictures, and even business card typography. For small teams without designers, daily social media operations are enough.

Of course, with the upper limit of creativity there, there is still a gap between what professional designers do. However, the two characteristics of "sufficient" and "fast" are more important than "stunning" in many scenarios.

My true combination usage

In practice, I rarely use only one tool. A more convenient process is like this:

The first step is to use Midjourney or Nano Banana to explore the visual direction. It takes about half an hour to an hour or two to determine 2-3 style directions.

The second step is to use Scrape or Nano Banana to do logo design in this direction, and come up with three or four plans in each direction.

if the process is complete, use Looka or Brandmark to generate brand specifications and material templates to save time for manual typesetting.

The fourth step is to mainly do packaging on Nano Banana. After the preliminary plan is made, if it is not a particularly complicated design, find a part-time designer to do vector conversion and detail adjustments in half an hour, which will not cost much money.

After the whole process, the total cost is about a few hundred to one or two thousand yuan (mainly the expenses of part-time designers), with a cycle of one or two weeks. It is indeed much faster and cheaper than traditional design, but I would never say "cost reduction by 97%"-the main savings are the time costs of trial and error and communication costs, and the threshold for truly good design is still there.

A few heartfelt suggestions

Don't spend a lot of money on VI, especially when you're starting a business. I have seen too many entrepreneurs spend tens of thousands on brand design, and then half a year later, the entire VI is completely overturned and restarted due to direction adjustment. First use AI to quickly create a usable version, and then consider upgrading when the business is running and the brand positioning is clear.

Don't use AI's original drawings to register directly. No matter what tool you use to generate the logo, it is best to go through it with a designer before registering to do vectorization and fine-tuning. This step doesn't cost much money, but it can avoid a lot of trouble later.

Establish a brand asset library. No matter what tool you use, after you decide on it, you will use one set of logos, one set of color numbers, and one set of fonts. Start from these source files every time you make new materials, don't recreate them on AI every time-if you do that too much, you will find that your brand vision becomes more and more scattered.

Many AI-generated solutions are both good and bad. My experience is that if I ask AI to come up with 50 solutions at a time and then pick them myself, it's better to divide them into 5 rounds, each round will come up with 10 solutions, and pick the best round to continue in depth. This kind of "convergent" iteration is more efficient and is not easy to get lost in hundreds of schemes.

final thoughts

When it comes to brand design, the advancement of AI tools has indeed given small teams an unprecedented starting point. In the past, you might have to spend tens of thousands of yuan to see "What would it be like if I followed this style direction", but now you can see it for tens of yuan. This information gap and the reduction in trial and error costs have, to be honest, really changed many things.

But I also found one thing: the distance between using AI to create a visible logo and creating a truly recognizable brand is not enough to fill in with tools. What that distance requires is an understanding of the user, an understanding of the product, and an answer to the question "What kind of brand do I want to be?" AI can help you express, but it cannot think for you.

So now my attitude towards AI design tools is: it is my starting point, not the end point.