We Designed 10 Logos With AI: The Honest Results
Updated · May 19, 2026
Fifty logos, five tools, ten identical briefs. We ran the same brief into every major AI logo tool available today and tracked what came back — not just whether the output looked good, but whether you could actually ship it to a client. The short answer: purpose-built logo tools beat general image generators on file quality and delivery consistency, but Midjourney still produces the most visually interesting starting points. Whether that tradeoff matters depends entirely on what you’re building.
The setup
We wrote ten logo briefs covering different industries and visual styles: a farm-to-table restaurant, a B2B SaaS startup, a personal fitness trainer, a law firm, a children’s toy brand, a coffee roastery, an architecture studio, a pet care service, a music production company, and a fashion e-commerce brand. Each brief was two sentences — the industry and three adjectives describing the target aesthetic.
We ran each brief through five tools: Midjourney v6.1, Canva‘s AI logo generator, Adobe Express with Firefly, Looka, and Designs.ai. Same prompt, word for word, in every tool. We judged each output on four criteria: concept accuracy (did it match the brief?), visual quality, editability for real delivery, and iteration speed. The metric that mattered most: how many of the ten logos from each tool could we hand to a client without further work in Illustrator or Figma.
Which tool actually understood the brief?
Looka and Designs.ai scored highest on concept accuracy because they’re trained specifically on logo briefs, not on general visual aesthetics. When we prompted for a minimal wordmark for a law firm — navy and gold, serif, traditional — both tools returned exactly that: clean typographic lockups with a restrained icon. Not exciting. Correct.
| Tool | Concept accuracy | Visual quality | Logos usable as-is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midjourney v6.1 | Medium | Excellent | 4 of 10 |
| Canva AI Logo | Medium | Good | 5 of 10 |
| Adobe Express + Firefly | Medium-high | Very good | 5 of 10 |
| Looka | High | Good | 7 of 10 |
| Designs.ai | High | Good | 6 of 10 |
Midjourney’s visual quality was in a different league. On the fitness trainer brief, it produced a geometric shield mark with sharp angles and a confident gradient — something a mid-tier branding agency would be proud of. On the children’s toy brand, it returned a hand-lettered wordmark with real character and warmth.
But “visually impressive” and “logo-ready” aren’t the same thing. Here’s the Midjourney output for that law firm brief — “a minimal wordmark for a law firm, navy and gold, serif font, traditional, trustworthy”:
A painterly depiction of scales of justice with a serif font overlay, deep navy background, strong cinematic lighting — more movie poster than business card.
Striking. Completely unusable as a logo without significant post-processing. Midjourney doesn’t understand what a logo needs to do in the world. It understands what looks good in a frame.
Editability, file formats, and what you actually get to keep
This is where the results became stark. Midjourney outputs rasterized JPEGs and PNGs — no layers, no editable text, no vector paths. In our testing, every Midjourney output required redrawing in vector software before it was deliverable, adding roughly 45 to 90 minutes of production time per logo. Factor that in before assuming it’s the faster option.
Canva lets you edit directly in-browser — swap fonts, recolor, adjust spacing. But SVG export is locked behind Canva Pro (around $15/month). On the free tier, you get PNG only. Fine for personal projects, a real problem for client handoffs where the printer needs a scalable file.
Adobe Express sits in an interesting middle position for teams already paying for Creative Cloud. Firefly-generated elements drop into Express’s editor, and SVG export is available on paid plans from around $10/month. The problem we hit: Firefly’s logo-specific generation is still inconsistent. It produced strong wordmarks for four of our ten briefs but defaulted to full-bleed illustration styles for the other six — outputs that needed substantial editing before they resembled logos at all.
| Tool | SVG export | Editable in-tool | Logo-specific training | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Midjourney | No | No | No | $10–$30/month |
| Canva | Paid only | Yes | Partial | Free / ~$15/month |
| Adobe Express | Paid only | Partial | Partial | Free / ~$10/month |
| Looka | Yes | Limited | Yes | ~$80 one-time |
| Designs.ai | Yes | Yes | Yes | ~$29/month |
Unlike Midjourney and Canva’s free tier, Looka and Designs.ai both deliver complete file packages on every export: SVG, transparent PNG, and favicon-sized variants. Looka’s one-time brand kit (~$80) includes color palette, font pairings, and mockups on business cards and apparel. Designs.ai’s $29/month subscription covers more ground — social media templates, brand guidelines, presentation assets — if you need the full identity stack rather than just the mark.
What surprised us
We expected Midjourney to dominate. It didn’t — not by the metric that matters for most people, which is getting something deliverable before the client’s deadline.
The biggest surprise was how heavily the brief format influenced results. When we wrote evocative, mood-board style prompts (“like a 1920s letterpress print shop, but modern”), Midjourney produced work the logo tools genuinely couldn’t match. When we wrote functional specifications (“minimal wordmark, law firm, navy and gold, traditional”), the purpose-built tools won every time. The implication: Midjourney rewards a different kind of creative fluency that not every designer or founder has.
Iteration speed was also a larger factor than we anticipated. In Looka, clicking “generate more like this” produced coherent variations in under ten seconds. Each Midjourney iteration required rewriting the prompt, waiting through a generation cycle, then selecting and upscaling — a workflow that’s fine when you have time, painful when you don’t.
We also noticed that after four or five Looka briefs, the outputs started sharing structural templates — similar icon placements, similar typographic proportions. By brief seven, the seams were showing. Designs.ai had slightly more variation, though less visual ambition overall. Neither tool has fully solved the homogeneity problem that makes AI logos recognizable as AI logos to trained eyes.
Which tool should you actually use?
For client deliverables where file format and consistency matter, Looka is the most practical tool we tested. In our ten-brief run, 7 of 10 outputs were directly usable without post-processing — a higher hit rate than any other tool here. It understands what a logo needs to be functionally, even if it doesn’t always produce work that turns heads.
For visual quality and creative ambition, Midjourney is still the best AI image tool available. Treat it as a concept generator, not a production tool. Run your briefs, find the directions that excite you, then redraw the key elements as vectors in Figma or Illustrator. The two-step process is slower than Looka, but the ceiling is higher.
Adobe Express is the right call if you’re already inside the Adobe ecosystem and your briefs skew toward wordmark-heavy designs — Firefly has improved noticeably in 2026 for typographic logos specifically. Otherwise, the inconsistent logo-mode output makes it hard to justify over the dedicated tools.
Canva is the right call for internal use: team avatars, event logos, presentation branding where scalable files don’t matter. Anything client-facing, the format limitations will catch up with you at the worst possible moment.
Frequently asked questions
Can AI logo tools replace a professional designer?
For straightforward briefs with clear stylistic references, purpose-built tools like Looka can produce client-ready results faster and cheaper than hiring a freelancer. For identity systems that need to hold up across brand guidelines, diverse media, and future brand extensions, a human designer still makes better systemic judgment calls.
Which AI tool gives you the best logo file formats?
Looka and Designs.ai deliver SVG, transparent PNG, and favicon files as standard on every export. Canva and Adobe Express support SVG on paid plans only. Midjourney outputs rasterized PNG and JPEG exclusively — no vectors, no exceptions.
Is Midjourney worth using for logo design if I can’t redraw vectors?
Honestly, no. The outputs require professional vector redrawing before they’re deliverable, which adds significant production time per logo. If you don’t have that skill or budget, Looka or Designs.ai will get you to a finished file faster with less frustration.
If you’re designing logos for clients or products that need to last, start with Looka for speed and file quality, then run a few briefs through Midjourney to see if it pushes you toward a better visual direction. Used together, they cover each other’s weaknesses — and you’ll still finish before a designer quotes you a project rate.
This article contains affiliate links. If you subscribe through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never changes what we recommend — we only link to tools we actually use. Full disclosure.
