AI Rant

[heyskull]

I have been in the sign industry since the mid 80s and owned my own business since 2001.
I am loosing my mind over the artwork clients are now presenting that they want on there signs & vehicles!!!
Basically they are asking ChatGPT or some other AI rendering programme to create a logo which spits out something that they think they want.
Everytime it is a low quality image that has no editable capabilities or is useable in the space they have.
How is everyone dealing with this issue as I am at my end trying to educate people?
Then what makes it worse is they resend exactly the same image over in a pdf and think this is now editable!!!

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[Texas_Signmaker]

I like it. They give you a design, color and layout they like. You can make some minor tweaks to make it sign worthy, but you're not having to come up with 3 design options and seeing if they like it or not. You guys find anything to complain about.

 

[dannyd1962]

So far, every client that has supplied me with AI mockups for vehicles hasn't had a problem with the end result. It shows me that they already know what they want beforehand, and I let them know it will take time to reconstruct it as close as possible. Just be honest with your client upfront about it.

 

[rydods]

Chat GPT is now my $20 a month graphic designer. If customers provide something that's unusable, I also use AI to fix it or make it more presentable and somewhat printable. It's just a matter of time until it can produce a usable vector file.
Face it...No one wants to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for design services anymore. They didn't want to 10 to 20 years ago.

 

[dannyd1962]

Yep. Been using Chat GPT myself to make images close to usable as possible without the hours needed to do it myself.

 

[Boudica]

On one hand I find the direction very helpful. On the other hand, it's generally not producible artwork so I have to recreate it. Depending on what it is, we will charge them for the design time to recreate it.
What kills me, is when I recreate it, send them a proof... And instead of edits to what I just created, they generate something completely different that I have to rebuild starting from scratch. This is when the education begins where I have to tell them that I can't produce their chatgpt prompts, and I need real artwork. Explain what I have to do. More design time, more $$ .... So far they get it after I explain the reality.
It's beginning to happen a LOT, so I'm becoming pretty quick with the education part.
Oh, and they always want changes to what they generated... Which is why I have to rebuild it.

 

[heyskull]

I have just had another logo submitted this morning that has two cartoon guys on it with a font/typeface that I cannot and other sites identify!
Also the other issue is the sign they want it applied to is the complete wrong shape for what has been supplied.
No longer are we signmakers we are magicians!

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[d fleming]

I design it, I make it. You design it, you make it.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

More I think about recent projects, the more they are using AI and it's helping. People used to call up and say "I need a sign" and ya gotta go down the whole rabbit hole of exploring and explaining what types of signs and guess at what they want. More often I get an AI generated image of the sign on their building and I just gotta bid it. It's really making life easier. I think all the old graphic designers out there are realizing their job is about to be eliminated. Still can't get rid of the installers....

 

[unclebun]

I just went through this with a customer who has a painting business. Had an AI logo, wanted his truck lettered. Already had business cards made with it. But he wanted some changes. The outline of a swoop went into the two letters that are the start of the name of the company (like TG Plumbing). He wanted that separated. I pointed out that the two initials at the start of the name were different fonts. And the letters of the other word were malformed (they had odd bends in the ends of the letters). There were also 4 different color outlines around the letters and he didn't want one of the colors. And of course everything was prismatic and shaded. He also wanted the lettering to stretch across both doors of his crew cab but the logo was square. And even at a size to put on one of the doors of the truck it's only 15 dpi. I told him it would be probably 2 weeks before we would get it done with a fully editable vector recreation of the logo and he said OK. So lo and behold I email him a proof of the finished logo and a design on the truck just he wanted and he says I already got it done somewhere else because you took so long. And lo and behold he just has a 15 dpi print of it on the front doors of the truck and nothing at all like what he asked for. Dam meth head painters.

 

[unclebun]

Here's another one. I designed a logo for a boat dealership locally perhaps 8 or 10 years ago. Did all their work and so on. A year or so ago the guy sells the business and the new owner builds a new building and showroom. They call me to do a manufacturer logo on the side of a boat along with their new logo for a boat show. They email me the new logo which is really just the old logo with the word SUPER added between BOATING and CENTER. The old one was all black letters and SUPER is red. And they changed the icon of a speedboat to a different one, and it's got a red stripe and outboard engines on it, same color. They only have it in a bitmap. The red looks okay but a little dull on the computer screen. I vectorize it and change the red to actual red instead of the reddish grayish brown that the file they sent me prints. We put it on the boat and the new owner and salesman are oohing and aahing about how good it looks compared to how the same logo on their trucks turned out from another company. I look at them and at their channel letters, and it's clear that whoever made them just used the color that was in the bitmap file they sent (turns out created by the owner's daughter). It looks like printed red that's about 5 years old and faded even though they are brand new.

The channel letters are white plastic faces with printed vinyl overlay. So now that they've seen how the logo looks with real red and how bad their stuff looks, they are having us quote re-doing everything on their brand new truck lettering and channel letters.

Last time I was there measuring the channel letters I noticed a Signicade in front of the entrance. Had the logo at the top and something about coming in and seeing a salesman written below. The whole thing was printed, and it looks like maybe the original file was a 72 dpi 2"x3" image blown up to 24"x36". Obviously ordered online by the owner's daughter...

 

[myront]

I deal with this on a daily basis. Canva files too! Most AI gives low quality images, not suitable for large print. Sure, there are plenty of print shops out there who don't care and print it as is. They're not considering that it's a reflection of your business. You're putting out really bad pixelated logos even on car wraps! Won't happen in this shop!
I tried using Copilot and ChatGPT to create me a 2ft x 6ft banner. Not once did it produce a file to those dimensions. I hade to tell it to make it 8ft to get a 6ft.
I will say that Copilot has given me some clipart that can be vectorized with a "quick trace & clean" within corel.
One, I think it was ChatGPT asked if I wanted an svg file, so I said yes. It was just text which I could have easily jut typed out myself. I have heard that there are AI apps that will produce vector files but I haven't check into it.

 

[bob]

I like it. They give you a design, color and layout they like. You can make some minor tweaks to make it sign worthy, but you're not having to come up with 3 design options and seeing if they like it or not. You guys find anything to complain about.

You do that? The last thing you ever want to give a customer is a choice. Ever. No matter how many options you have, present them one at a time.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

You do that? The last thing you ever want to give a customer is a choice. Ever. No matter how many options you have, present them one at a time.

Yea, but usually it's one design and the other two I just change the colors

 

[danno]

When I receive those files, I let them know the size it can be without pixelation. If they are good with that I proceed. If they request colour changes or modifications to the supplied art, I inform them of the time and price to recreate. I also let them know that a deposit will be required to begin work.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

about 35% of the logos i receive to quote are ai generated. Of those, half are either impossible to trace or require significant simplification to vector. Here are some beauties i turned down recently

 

[Boudica]

about 35% of the logos i receive to quote are ai generated. Of those, half are either impossible to trace or require significant simplification to vector. Here are some beauties i turned down recently

I'd pass on those too. no way

 

[Bobby H]

The so-called AI stuff is pretty lousy at generating production ready artwork. It's decent for brain-storming ideas. But it gets tripped up by details. The bots cannot do anything with consistency either. The same text prompt will generate different results. That's not acceptable with things like corporate branding, specific typefaces, spot color standards, etc.

Last week a customer needed a banner for a Boy Scouts troop community event. They used AI to generate the design they wanted. Naturally it was a pixel-based image and not in the right aspect ratio of the banner size they wanted. The AI bot tried to replicate the BSA logo, but glitched certain features like the stars inside the logo. The lettering was some mystery meat sans serif, not an actual font. I already had official BSA design assets so I was able to quickly and properly create the banner design. I merely used the customer's AI image as a style guide.

I've had to clean up and vectorize a decent number of AI-generated logos in the past couple or so years. One thing that's bad about these logos as opposed to the human-created stuff whipped together in Photoshop is the AI bots will bake all sorts of errors into the artwork. It can be a pain fixing that stuff. That's work added on top of the hand-tracing tasks.

And, yeah, some AI "logos" are really not logos at all. They're often photo-style images with too many details worked into them.

 

[Stacey K]

I don't mind when people send me AI because there's no guessing involved. I have few patience for artwork going back and forth a hundred times. Vector Doctors examples are tough. If those were mine I could do something with the first one to get it close by using clipart. The second and third would be "similar" but not the same.

I struggle also to replicate the AI look, it's like everything is smooth and shaded, it's hard to find clipart that's like that...or is it just me

 

[somcalmetim]

I just went through this with a customer who has a painting business. Had an AI logo, wanted his truck lettered. Already had business cards made with it. But he wanted some changes. The outline of a swoop went into the two letters that are the start of the name of the company (like TG Plumbing). He wanted that separated. I pointed out that the two initials at the start of the name were different fonts. And the letters of the other word were malformed (they had odd bends in the ends of the letters). There were also 4 different color outlines around the letters and he didn't want one of the colors. And of course everything was prismatic and shaded. He also wanted the lettering to stretch across both doors of his crew cab but the logo was square. And even at a size to put on one of the doors of the truck it's only 15 dpi. I told him it would be probably 2 weeks before we would get it done with a fully editable vector recreation of the logo and he said OK. So lo and behold I email him a proof of the finished logo and a design on the truck just he wanted and he says I already got it done somewhere else because you took so long. And lo and behold he just has a 15 dpi print of it on the front doors of the truck and nothing at all like what he asked for. Dam meth head painters.

Get Topaz Gigapixel and upscale his BS AI image into something usable...its more AI but it actually recreates things when upscaling...crisps up text and even some cartoon style artwork better than the original