I teamed up with professional designer Shino Misawa to create the “Villa Okinawa” logo with full use of AI, and I’ve summarized the process of how we went about it. creating logo creatives with AI is challenging, so I thought this would be a good reference for you.

AI makes professionals more capable of extending their capabilities, but never turns amateurs into professionals.
Also, my hypothesis is that the use of image generation AI is better suited for design than art. This is because design has a client, a clear intention, and a goal. On the other hand, art has no clear goal because it is its own client, and there is no setting to explain.

The most important thing in design is to clarify the client’s requirements. Once upon a time, the president of an owner-operated company in the Kansai region came to us to produce a TV commercial on consignment and said, “Make me a commercial that will light up the world, and I’ll leave it to you. The image of “perky” was different, and the client himself was not clear on the goal of “perky,” so we ended up having to redo the commercial for no good reason.

The first step is to verbalize the goal image. If we simply say “Hawaiian-ish,” the attributes can be narrowed down considerably. If we narrow down the attribute information to “warmth,” “handmade,” “healthy,” “chocolate,” etc., we can do some very specific creative work.

…. but that alone can only produce a mediocre monomaniacal design.

The other day, the “AI” kept reading the first move in a Shogi match against the prodigy Sota Fujii. The effectiveness of the next move is expressed as a percentage. The AI’s judgment of the superiority of the opponent, Murata 6-dan, and Fujii 7-kan, was 98% and 2%, respectively, in the judgment made by the AI, which was shown in real time. Fujii overcame the crisis and won the championship.

In other words, while AI can only divine tomorrow based on yesterday’s sequence, a prodigy player can make spontaneous moves as his right brain dictates. It is this moment that produces the best creativity.

Design is the same, and brilliant, top-notch work can be done when the best designers come up with the odd right-brain idea. In the creative world, AI is a tool that not only improves work efficiency, but also enables a leap forward in human ability.

Now, Shino carefully summarized the production process of Okinawa Villa.
The document shows the process from the initial resort and villa concept that was assembled to the 228 image generation iterations and continued experimentation with prompts and variations of the word in various directions, which ultimately resulted in a logo that includes 12 important concepts.

This means that it takes more effort than usual for professionals to use AI and extend their creativity. In the current trend of talking about AI, it is often used to save time and streamline the creation of materials, but when it comes to “AI + creativity,” it takes a lot of work for the creator. And that labor is the right-brain work that only professionals can do.

If the client is at the level of, “I put in a few prompts and it’s automatically done with the logo,” they may be able to use AI like a toy! If the client is at the level of “I just put in a few prompts and it’s done automatically! If you want professional output, on the other hand, you will need more motivation and techniques than usual.