Fantastic concept! But I'm completely turned off by the IP terms ([1] below). This suggests LogoFox is pushing icons without doing IP checks, and selling them as finished logo designs without any assurance that the user won't get sued because of this.
Don't take this as negative feedback, but as a tip to re-think the legal side approach. Better would be that you
(a) you do some copyright checks and your terms state what checks have been done; and
(b) once someone pays for the logo, they own the IP rights in the logo.
[1] "Third Party Design Resources – You may use purchased End Products outside of the Site, whether for commercial or personal purposes. Prior to creating and using any End Product, LogoFox highly recommends you to perform due diligence to determine that the use of the Design Resources is free of any adverse claims and is not subject to any third party rights. LogoFox may also use symbols provided by The Noun Project, a third party content provider that obtains the symbols from other third party contributors. All use of these Symbols is AT YOUR OWN RISK. "
Hi, Alan from LogoFox here. I understand your concern regarding the IP terms.
I will make it straight and simple.
1) We use third-party icons from The Noun Project. We use their Pro API which gave us the right to use and sell the icons in part of the logos. Those icons are from thousand designers around the world. Normally when a designer uploads an icon on The Noun Project, they gave their IP. But, how can we be sure the icon uploaded is really their own creation? We can't.
2) We use hundreds of fonts. We check the license for all of them. But even with that, there is still a small risk of license infringement.
3) Thousand of logos are created every hour on LogoFox. Some will probably look similar to existing logos out there. For obvious reasons, we can't personally take the liability for the logo generated on the site. You have to make your due diligence.
Those 3 reasons mainly explain our current terms. This allows us to protect ourselves from any liability problems that may occur. Those liabilities also exist with a logo designed by a logo designer. The difference is, we don't deal with one logo a week but with thousand. So we adapted our terms accordingly. I hope you understand.
TLDR: no matter if your logo comes from a logo maker or a designer. You have to make your due diligence.
The problem with this model is that if you aren't able to do due diligence yourself due to technical restrictions, how are your end users supposed to overcome the even greater technical restrictions on due diligence that using your service imposes?
Fundamentally, the problem is not the fact LogoFox is a logo maker. Because this applies also to logo designers. A due diligence is done on a case-by-case basis by someone specialized in doing this. We process thousands of logos, we naturally can't make a due diligence for every single one logo created.
A logo? Remove the automatic part and focus just on the deliverable; whether it's made by a computer or by a human, what you get is a few concepts before you select the one you like. And then you go with a lawyer to protect your IP.
Ok, why pay for a deliverable I might not be legally allowed to use, or might be associated with unknown follow-on costs to aquire that right? They are obtaining third-party resources somewhere, they would be in an excellent position to provide relevant documentation.
Unless I'm missing it in the terms, the user isn't even clearly allowed to use their designs as the basis of a known-safe design, since they don't explicitly permit changes to it?
Third party resources? The problem isn't the stock images or shapes the generator uses, the problem is you could create a logo for "Disney" here or accidentally make something too close to Blogspot's logo because your company name has the same initials and you like the rounded square shape that gets generated.
Read the section of the terms of service being discussed. It's about "third-party design resources" and how you are using them at your own risk, not about a general guarantee that the logo isn't conflicting with an existing trademark etc.
When talking about the finished logo, they talk about "End Products".
They define "Design Resources" as
Throughout the process LogoFox will also make use of certain symbols, colors, fonts and other design elements (collectively known as "Design Resources”)
[...]
and then state
d. Third Party Design Resources
[...] All use of these Symbols is AT YOUR OWN RISK. You shall abide by all copyright notices, trademark rules, and shall not use, copy, reproduce, modify, translate, publish, broadcast, transmit, distribute, perform, upload, display, license, sub-license, rent, lend, assign, gift, sell or otherwise transfer or distribute for any purposes whatsoever any portion of the Design Resources not owned by you: (i) without the express prior written consent of the respective owners or (ii) in any way that violates any third party right.
You acknowledge that some fonts and symbols used during the Design Process might have been licensed from a third party provider. Under no circumstances will LogoFox be liable in any way for any Design Resources, including, but not limited to, for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any Materials or any part thereof.
Delivering a design where you can't even tell the customer about the license of the fonts you used is... weak. If you want to offer cheap designs, use open fonts or clearly tell the customer where they can get their own license, don't just let them figure it out themselves.
He's not talking about trademark protection, but copyright permissions to the assets used in the logos. I'd absolutely expect to have explicit licensing to redistribute and modify a logo, and from the T&C, it doesn't look like you even get that.
All they really do is take the thing you typed in and put in a few different fonts.. This doesn't seem worth any amount of money. I can do that in mspaint.
> If I contract someone to make me a logo, I can normally safely assume there won’t be lingering IP issues after I have the deliverable.
This clause is not about copyright on the logo itself. It's about trademark law and all the difficulties therein.
I understand your concern about copyright. In copyright, the source of the image is what matters, not its appearance: If you created your own logo that happens to be similar to an existing logo, but did not actually copy the existing item (and could prove that), you'd be fine. If you did copy it, and made significant changes until it didn't look confusingly like the original, you'd be guilty. But this isn't the problem that "perform due diligence to determine that the use of the Design Resources is free of any adverse claims and is not subject to any third party rights" is warning you about.
Trademark law is different than copyright law. If you create a brand new logo that, unfortunately, happens to look by random chance similar to another logo that already exists in your market but you didn't know about, that's an IP issue. You need to search out and differentiate your logo from all conflicting logos that already exist.
This search is why no artist or automatic logo generator could guarantee that you're able to use the outputs.
While you're correct, I don't think that's why the terms are stated as they are. This site is aggregating symbols and appears to be completely uninformed about the origin's copyright. The chance that one of the icons has licensing terms is pretty high.
Only if your contract specifically states that the artist will check your logo against registered trademarks for potential infringement. Usually that requires two people, an IP lawyer and a logo designer.
You're technically correct, but for a simple logo designed by an artist doesn't usually need an IP lawyer as long as the concept is unique enough. It's not going to be an issue nearly as much as if the logo was sourced from an icon aggregator site that completely disavowed any copyright claims.
How does anyone know if you have the legal right to use this? I guess you could litigate over it and have a judge rule that you own it? What I am trying to say is that the straight forward way to legal protection is to include lawyer fees in whatever you charge customers. You can either make your product more expensive or you can try make things work for a lot more people. I don't think you can do both (once again I would love to be proven wrong).
Edit: it seems to be talking about copyright. I retract my comment. I think if you pay money, you should definitely have a full copyright license to do everything you need to do with a logo that identifies your business.
Really? You're paying for logo creation. Due diligence is different and likely more costly. I see no problem with the current model because it provides a useful service for a fee. Just because it doesn't provide a more useful service for a larger fee doesn't make it useless.
Wow whats with the instant downvotes? Come on guys get off the high horses and have a little tolerance for banter. This project will most likely trap you in some sort of legal issues. I just summed it
Companies pay thousands for logos that are culturally flawed, or just, y'know flawed. OGC was a big example a few years back [the logo version looks rather like a person playing with their penis].
I tried it out and the UI is poor. Things like clicking buttons don't result in any user-visible action, like a page loading, or even something bad (but not as terrible as nothing) like the button changing contents -- a couple of seconds later the next step happens. This means clicking is click, hope for the best, wait 300ms, get bored, click again, give up. Same for the search, type in a term, the list of icons disappears, and is repopulated when matches are found -- unless no matches are found then nothing happens, you have to wait until you are pretty certain that the blank icon area means no matches and not searching.
I agree that this sort of sucks for real designers but this is the sort of crap we are going to be dealing with more and more as proponents of AI and machine learning get their way.
This tool is not useful for generating a great logo, yet. But it does produce a bunch of random ideas that might allow a human to come up with an awesome idea.
For example I worked with a designer I found on craiglist for my logo for Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com)
I was very happy with her work and help coming up with the idea, I paid her in full and ended up creating my own version which is the one I'm using today.
I think this sort of program could be marketed to real designers to help them get the creative juices flowing.
LogoFox is a very cool idea, basically hot or not or tinder of design, something I was talking to the founders of hatchwise about.
Quick side note, noticed a small typo on your website: "Ad networks on free comment systems do more then hurt your brand, they also track, spy, and slow down your pages", that "then" should be "than", just fyi :-)
I used LogoJoy [1] a year or so ago to create a logo for my side business. This appears to have a lot of the same "designs" available as LogoJoy, but with a much less intuitive UX.
This feels like the logos are better than there and logojoy took me through far too many steps. Leaving the forced registration to right before you even get to see the logos they generated.
Looks like you can browse through some logos by using arrow keys to scroll the logos below the forced registration. But I agree, the forced registration is a really lousy thing to do.
I preferred the design process at LogoJoy though, especially the choice of colors and explaining what the colors often mean.
I'd change the heart button to "Like it & Save It". I was clicking Like it loads of times expecting something to happen then realized I was never going to get a logo doing that. I didn't realize the heart did anything.
Also need some way of downloading them without giving the email. It is not clear whether giving my email is going to let me download them or just get back to where I was, where I need to buy them.
Finally the logos seem quite basic for a premium service. I could knock those up in Inkscape for free.
What's your point? You can also get professional logos for $100,000. Logofox has valued their professional design at $990, it's subjective whether you think that is high or low.
Congrats on the launch. Yes, some folks have mentioned about the UI not being optimized or whatever. But it's easy to defer launching with the hope that everything would be "perfect" from the get-go. In any case, it's a good enough MVP and hopefully you'll get some sales and valuable feedback to improve your product further.
You should respect the capitalization in at least some of the suggested logos. I either got all caps, or only the first letter capitalized. If someone uses a non standard capitalization its probably for a reason.
Great concept, congrats on shipping. I think there's a big market for automatic logo creation, however I don't think using icons from The Noun Project is the answer because the output looks generic, and that's not something you want if you are paying $30.
I'm just thinking aloud, but the brand name should get the idea for the isotype and then generate it from scratch, not just using it. Also, the brand name should give the idea of whether is a serious business, or a playful one.
On the experience I had a few ideas: after selecting the icons, there's no «next», just «close» button, which sounds like I will lose my progress. And I get you're generating the logos on the fly, but don't let me see a brief moment of "error creating your logo". At least wait a few seconds before showing it.
Hmm "fast" logo maker - sure, it's fairly quick to use, but is speed of creation really what people optimize for when creating a logo for their <whatever>?
I feel like you'd be better off emphasizing ease of use for non-designers or something.
Not sure how sophisticated the permutations are, but it seems that logos are a great way to test out various deep learning methods of image/symbol generation.
As impressive as the AI music that sounds like Chopin is, I would love to see what can be done with a logo, especially if some copy about the company and product were also provided as input.
I expected the app to somehow "understand" the brand name and that the meaning(s) would influence suggestions. I don't think that's happening, or at least it's very basic. I tried "Cloudera" and "Red Badger" and got very similar suggestions none of which had to do with the name at hand.
This is a nice tool and I would like to use it for my side project. My project is called "closet.zone", but when I typed that in, I got logos for "closet". When I instead typed in "ClosetZone", the tool seemed to interpret it as "closetz one", and stylized "one" in most logos.
The mobile version needs help. I'm not sure I'd recommend this to my clients who have zero budget vs some of the other googlable logo makers (I'm a graphic designer who does periodic logo work and I offer to fix these auto-logos to make them more appropriate).
Doesn't seem to work, if I choose text+logo, I only get a square with the first letter of the name I chose.
Also, the icon browser needs some kind of loading indicator, now I don't know if there are no results or if the search is taking long.
Seems like it'd be good to be able to specify word breaks. For my little consulting company name, Forthright, it assumes that the word breaks are "For" and "thright", which results in some weird looking logos.
I wonder if this is trending because due to word shape pattern matching, for 50ms my brain thinks that is about Firefox which is itself hot news right now. Then one I realise it isn't I click anyway.
The search is case sensitive which produces no result when your phone starts with caps automatically.
I selected icon only, picked an icon, clicked close, and it showed me a bunch of text only logos with no icon. I went back, picked a shape, clicked close, and the loading screen just kept loading.
Yes, UI is a wreck. In addition, services like this demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding as to what logos are for and how they function. You can't communicate your brand's identity effectively by clicking some buttons and going on your "gut." Do yourself a favor: pay for a professional.
That's not what this tool is for. It's not even a service. It's just a tool.
This site demonstrates a fundamental understanding of what logos are for and how they are used in today's internet.
It's a generic logo maker. That should be an oxymoron, but it's not. It's LogoFox!
It's not, because of the abundance of generic web sites, generic blogs, generic businesses, and even generic brands, that just need a generic logo.
For what you claim to be true, the client must have a brand identity first. And those that do, know themselves. They will have input a professional could use for a logo that reflects that identity. They will look at a tool like LogoFox and say no.
Except, there are two traps here immediately in the path of your advice.
1. Who is this "professional". Agency, free lancer, artist friend, or local small business that also does logo design?
2. Most "professionals" serve their clients "gut" anyway. And many business brands are based on the tastes of the owners, which they have every right to impose on their customers and any professionals they hire to put into vector format, even to no benefit of their own...
Or maybe there is a benefit? After all, it is who they are. Maybe it does connect with like minded customers. Who would any "professional" be to judge?
And honestly, Many find the new ebay logo, Microsoft logo, and google logo boring, generic, and uninspired. Professionals did these logos. It's safe to say the higher-ups signed off on these designs.
At the end of the day, it's what the client wants, and it's for the client to sign off on.
Sure, like they were successful because of the logo :-/
I don't know why we have to always take the most improbable one-in-a-time cases like Facebook, Amazon, and other huge corporations and compared them with regular folks (whom are the ones who would use this tool).
It's not about people telling if they can spot which logo is made by a pro vs an app.
For a logo to be effective, it has to communicate an intent/personality/style according to what the brand is about. And the probabilty that an app achieves that is based on pure luck.
I get that generic logos may look "nice", but a logo is not about that.
Now you assume that logo's are only for businesses. I'm looking for a few logo's for an open source project of mine and I think tools like this are suiteble to create logo's for this purpose.
Same can be said about most things but that doesn't/won't stop people from using things like this. The same goes for web Development I used to be a freelance web designer in 2000s-2009 which gave way to do it yourself 1 click websites, forums, and WordPress which people use blindly. I was recently looking at local businesses web presence and 3 I found were using WordPress to serve up mostly static pages all out of date 1 was hijacked and serving pornography TGP with a link on the main page to it. I contacted the owner who could seem to care more about being bothered than the fact his family friendly restaurant and website were serving up hardcore porn. took them 24 hours to fix something that should have took less than 5 minutes. and they only removed the link their website is still hijacked the script is still on their site and the exploiter could return at anytime and start serving up malware. I documented everything pretty well and am going to use it as a case example to these other local businesses to hopefully use some sense and not try and DIY and hire if not me, someone to maintain their websites. 1 last comical thing is another one of them was using their FTP credentials in css to link a picture
As pointed out above, if you are looking for a rough logo for a personal project logo generators can be good enough.
Step above that would be the "gig economy" marketplace style sites for generic logo creation. Be wary here though, many people spam these with knock-offs or direct copies of existing logos & resell content. Basically make sure to image search anything you get.
From a pragmatic standpoint you can get something pretty good out of these for the short term before rebranding down the road.
For finding serious custom branding services you can look through a number of creative sites for talent. Creative job boards like Cloroflot (www.coroflot.com/design-jobs), Behance (www.behance.net/joblist) or Dribbble (dribbble.com/jobs) can fit the bill here. You can also search portfolios at these sites and directly reach out to designers that match your style.
For smaller (or leaner) projects I had good experiences with top rated logo designers on Fiverr for around ~$100.
For more serious projects, you should probably go with a trusted designer recommended from your personal network, where a logo is part of a complete brand package.
Don't take this as negative feedback, but as a tip to re-think the legal side approach. Better would be that you
(a) you do some copyright checks and your terms state what checks have been done; and (b) once someone pays for the logo, they own the IP rights in the logo.
[1] "Third Party Design Resources – You may use purchased End Products outside of the Site, whether for commercial or personal purposes. Prior to creating and using any End Product, LogoFox highly recommends you to perform due diligence to determine that the use of the Design Resources is free of any adverse claims and is not subject to any third party rights. LogoFox may also use symbols provided by The Noun Project, a third party content provider that obtains the symbols from other third party contributors. All use of these Symbols is AT YOUR OWN RISK. "