What you’ll be able to do

By the end of this you’ll have a working logo, made with AI, that you can actually use somewhere. Not a nice picture that sits on your desktop forever. An actual usable file, checked properly, ready to go on a website or a van door or wherever you need it.

I’ll also show you how to test it before you commit, because that’s the bit most people skip.

Before you start

Right, a few things you need to know before you open any tool.

AI image generators are getting better at making logo-style images, but there’s a catch. Most of them still struggle to render text properly inside an image. Ask for a logo with your business name spelled out and you might get something close, or you might get gibberish that looks like letters but isn’t. Ideogram tends to be better at actual text than most. ChatGPT and Gemini are decent for concepts, shapes, symbols, the vibe of a mark, but treat any text they generate as a starting point to fix, not a finished product.

Second thing: file format. A real logo needs to exist as a vector file, usually an SVG. Vectors scale up to a billboard or down to a favicon without going blurry. Almost every AI image generator gives you a raster file, a PNG, which is made of pixels and gets fuzzy the bigger you make it. So you’ll need an extra step: either take your AI concept into a design tool and rebuild it properly, or get someone to trace it into vector form. I’ll cover this in the “get set up” section.

Third, and this one matters: trademark risk. AI models learn from huge amounts of existing imagery, and they can produce something that looks a lot like an existing logo without meaning to. You need to check your result against the UK trademark register and do a reverse image search before you use anything commercially. More on that later too.

Last thing, ownership. Who owns an AI-generated image depends entirely on the terms of the tool you used. Read them. Don’t assume.

Get set up

You need two things: an AI tool to generate concepts, and a design tool to turn the best concept into something usable.

For the AI tool, I’d start with either ChatGPT or Gemini for general concepts, since both can generate images through their chat interface, or Ideogram if you know your logo needs readable text in it.

For the follow-up, Canva, Looka, and Adobe Express are all logo makers that will let you rebuild your concept properly and export usable files, including vector formats in some cases. Canva’s free tier is a sensible place to start if you’ve not used any of these before. Looka is built specifically around logos, so it’s worth a look if you want something more guided. Adobe Express sits somewhere in between, more design-tool, less pure logo-generator.

Before you touch any of them, write your brief down. Actually write it, don’t just think it. You need:

  • Your business name
  • What you actually do, in one plain sentence
  • Three adjectives that describe the feel you want (calm, bold, playful, whatever’s true)
  • Two things you definitely don’t want (for example: no clip art, no gradients)
  • Where the logo needs to work: favicon, website header, van signage, packaging, all of it

That last point matters more than people think. A logo that only works at billboard size is useless if your main use case is a tiny circle on a phone screen.

Try it yourself

Here’s a starting prompt you can copy into ChatGPT or Gemini. Swap in your own details.

I'm designing a logo concept for a business called [NAME]. 
We [what you do in one sentence]. 
The feel should be: [three adjectives]. 
Avoid: [two things to avoid]. 
It needs to work as a small icon (like a favicon) and also on 
large signage. 
Give me six different logo direction concepts, described and 
shown separately, not one final polished version. 
Keep them simple enough to redraw as flat vector shapes.

Ask for six directions, not one. This is the bit people get wrong, they ask for “a logo” and get attached to the first thing that comes back. Six gives you range: a symbol-only option, a text-based one, something abstract, something literal. You need the spread before you narrow down.

Once you’ve got six back, pick the two or three that are closest to what you want, and refine with something like this:

I like directions 2 and 4. Combine the icon style from 2 with 
the simpler colour palette from 4. Keep it flat, no gradients, 
and make sure it would still be recognisable if shrunk down to 
the size of an app icon.

If you’re using Ideogram specifically because you need text rendered accurately, your prompt should be more direct about the wording:

Create a simple, flat logo mark with the text "[YOUR BUSINESS NAME]" 
rendered clearly and legibly. Minimal icon alongside the text, 
[colour] and [colour] only, no drop shadows, no 3D effects.

Don’t expect perfection on the first go. Regenerate. Tweak the wording. It’s a back and forth, not a one-shot thing.

Once you’ve got a concept you actually like, take it into Canva, Looka, or Adobe Express and rebuild it there using their logo tools, so you end up with proper layered, editable, vector-exportable files rather than a single flat AI image.

Check the result

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it’s the one that matters most.

First, shrink it. Take your logo and view it at 32 pixels, roughly favicon size. Can you still tell what it is? If it turns into a blur or a smudge, it’s too detailed and needs simplifying.

Second, drain the colour. Convert it to black and white, or just squint at it in greyscale. Does it still work? A lot of logos lean entirely on colour to do the job, and that falls apart the moment it needs to go on a fax, a stamp, or a black and white printed invoice.

Third, and don’t skip this one: search it. Go to the UK Intellectual Property Office trademark register and search your business name and anything close to your visual mark. Then do a reverse image search on Google Images using your logo file. AI generators can and do produce results that closely resemble existing marks, sometimes by accident, sometimes because the training data included something very similar. You want to catch that now, not after you’ve printed a thousand business cards.

Fourth, check it at real sizes on real things: a mock-up on a website header, a van side if that’s relevant to you, a social media profile circle. Different platforms crop differently. A logo that’s a perfect square might get chopped into a circle on some platforms and lose its edges.

If it passes all four, you’re in decent shape.

If it doesn’t work

A few common snags and what to do about them.

If the text keeps coming out wrong or unreadable, stop asking the AI to render it and instead generate the icon or symbol only, then add your business name as proper text in Canva or a similar tool afterwards. Much more reliable.

If everything you get back looks too similar, too generic, or like every other AI logo you’ve seen online, go back to your brief and get more specific. Vague adjectives like “modern” and “professional” produce vague results. Try more concrete descriptive words instead, tied to what your business actually does.

On privacy: don’t hand over anything you’re not comfortable with an AI company potentially storing or using to improve their models, depending on the tool’s terms. That includes unreleased business names if secrecy matters to you, financial details, or anything under an NDA. Read the tool’s terms before you paste in sensitive information. If in doubt, leave it out and describe things more generally instead.

If your trademark or reverse image search turns up something too close to your result, don’t use it. Go back and regenerate with different direction, different shapes, different concept entirely. It’s a lot cheaper to redo this now than to deal with a trademark dispute later.

And if you’re just not getting anywhere after several attempts, it might be worth trying a different tool entirely rather than endlessly refining the same one. Ideogram, ChatGPT, and Gemini all approach image generation a bit differently, so a fresh tool sometimes breaks a stuck pattern.

Keep exploring

If this has gone well and you want to build out more visual assets, have a look at our guide on how to get AI to create an image, which covers the broader basics of image generation beyond just logos. If you need something to put your new logo on, our guide on how to get AI to make a poster walks through that next step. And if you’re doing all this before you’ve even settled on a business name, it’s worth backtracking to our guide on how to get AI to name my business first.

Sources and review notes

Review date: 15 September 2026 — every source above was opened and checked against the text on that date.