Everyone says AI can replace me for $20 a month, so I tested it

If you design logos for a living, you've heard it by now. Why would anyone pay a designer when AI costs $20 a month?

It's easy to get defensive about that. But it's a fair question, so I decided to stop arguing and go and look at what I'm being compared to.

If I were running a small business, I'd ask the same thing.

So I tried it

To make it harder on myself, I didn't even use the $20 option. I used a free AI logo generator, with no account. I made up a business, a family bakery called Harbor & Thyme, and wrote the kind of brief a client might send me.

Well under a minute later, I had this.

I'll be honest. It's not bad. The name is spelled right, the lettering is clean, and the colours suit a bakery. A couple of years ago we could all laugh at the melted text. That joke is getting old.

If you need something for a school club, a weekend project, or a business idea you're still testing, this is probably enough. Paying a designer before you know the idea works isn't always smart.

Then I tried to use it like a real logo

Looking good in a browser is the easy part. A logo has to survive being used.

I made it small. Here's the same logo at the sizes it would really appear, from a website header down to a browser tab.

By 64 pixels you're squinting. At 32 it's a smudge. That doesn't make it a bad picture, it just means nobody has designed the small version yet, and a real logo job includes one.

I asked for a horizontal version. This is the one that got me. Shop signs and website headers are usually wide, so you'll always need one. I described the same logo and asked for it to be laid out side by side.

That isn't the same logo. The boat changed, the bright colours went, the lettering changed, and it added a tagline nobody asked for that reads "MAKBOR SMALL FAMILY/ BAK RRY SEA". It doesn't move your logo around. It draws a new one each time.

I looked closely at the boat. Zoomed in, I'm not sure it is a boat.

To me that looks more like a small church than something you'd see in a harbour. You'd never notice it in a chat window. You'd notice it on a two-metre shop sign. Look at the edges too. They're soft and blurry, because this is a picture made of pixels, not the kind of vector file a sign maker asks for.

I tried to get that vector file. There's a Vectorize button right there. It's one of the paid extras.

So is removing the little crayon watermark. And so are private images, which means on the free plan your brand-new logo sits in public. Even when you pay, an automatic trace still needs someone to check it and clean it up.

None of this means the tool is useless. It made a picture, quickly, for free. But a picture is only part of what a logo job is.

So what are you actually paying a designer for?

Not the drawing. Drawing is getting cheap, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. You're paying for the parts that happen around it:

• Asking the annoying questions. Who's this for? What are your competitors doing? Where will people actually see it? AI will happily answer the question you asked, even when it's the wrong one.
• Saying no. It will give you a logo every time you ask. I'll tell you when one is wrong for you, and why.
• Making it work everywhere. The tiny icon, the black and white version, the shop sign, the invoice, all clearly the same logo. I wrote a whole post about the logo files you should end up with.
• Being responsible for it. Which brings me to the part most people don't think about.

Does your logo look like someone else's?

While I was testing tools, I came across this page of ready-made logo templates on another free site. These are templates rather than AI results, but have a look at the bottom row and the Cloudix colours.

If you put something like that on your van, it's your problem, not the website's. A designer's job includes checking that your logo doesn't lean too close to someone else's. In the US, the Copyright Office has also said that writing prompts alone doesn't make you the author of what comes out, so a logo made that way may not be protected by copyright. That matters when the thing is supposed to be your brand.

Is everyone else panicking?

Less than the headlines suggest. In Clutch's survey of businesses, 88% said they use AI design tools, but only 18% said AI had reduced their need for human designers. Figma's survey of hiring managers found 47% saying demand for designers had gone up and 18% saying it had gone down. Figma sells design tools, so take that one with some salt.

That doesn't mean nothing's changing. Quick, simple, low-budget jobs are the easiest ones for AI to take, and pretending otherwise wouldn't help anyone.

When you should just use the AI tool

I'd rather tell you this than lose your trust:

• You're testing an idea and might drop it in a month.
• It's for something temporary, like an event or a one-off post.
• You genuinely don't have the budget yet. Use AI now and hire someone when the business can pay for it.

And when you shouldn't:

• Your name is going on signs, packaging, vans or anything expensive to reprint.
• You plan to trademark it.
• You need it to look right for years, not just this week.

If you're in the second group and want to talk it through, send me a message. If you're in the first group, go and make something. Then come back when it starts working.