AI image tools are not replacements for brand designers — but they are extraordinary brainstorming partners. Used well, they let you explore dozens of logo directions in an hour, then hand the strongest one to a designer for vector refinement. This tutorial gives you the exact prompt patterns that produce usable logo concepts, not generic clip-art.
Before we start, a short honest note: diffusion models do not produce vector files, and they often render text poorly. So we are not asking AI to deliver a final, production-ready logo. We are asking it to explore visual directions — icon ideas, mark concepts, brand-mood references — that a human designer can then refine in Illustrator or Figma. With that framing, AI becomes one of the most powerful tools in a brand identity workflow.
A logo prompt is fundamentally different from a portrait or landscape prompt. Instead of describing a scene, you are describing a graphic mark. The vocabulary shifts: you talk about shapes, geometry, line weight, negative space, and flatness. You explicitly say what the logo is not — not photorealistic, no gradients, no shadows.
Think of it like briefing a sketch artist over the phone. You are not describing the world — you are describing the contour of a single mark. Restraint and precision matter more than rich language here.
Beyond logos themselves, AI is excellent at generating brand mood boards — collections of textures, palettes, environments, and lifestyle images that capture the feel of a brand. These are often more valuable than the logo itself for early brand discovery work.
Weak prompt — uses scene language for a logo
a beautiful logo for a coffee shop with coffee cups and beans
in warm lighting"Beautiful", "warm lighting", and "coffee cups and beans" tell the model to produce a photographic, lit, three-dimensional scene. In Midjourney especially, this will produce a moody photograph of coffee on a wooden table — gorgeous, but completely unusable as a logo. There is no logo-language anywhere in the prompt.
Strong prompt — explicit logo vocabulary
Flat vector logo concept for a speciality coffee shop
called "Altura" (Spanish for "altitude").
Icon: a stylised coffee bean with a minimal mountain
silhouette inside, formed from clean geometric curves.
Single dark-roast brown colour (#5A2B1B) on a white background.
Style: modern, geometric, professional, suitable for
app icon, business card, and shopfront signage.
Inspired by Aaron Draplin and mid-century badge design.
Constraints: NO gradients. NO photographic elements.
NO drop shadows. NO text in the icon itself.
Flat, single-colour, scalable vector aesthetic.
--ar 1:1 --v 6 --style rawThis prompt produces a clean, single-colour bean-and-mountain mark on white — exactly the kind of concept you can drop into Figma and trace into a real vector. Adobe Firefly works particularly well here because of its commercial licensing.
Tip: Generate logo concepts in square (1:1) aspect ratio on a clean white or solid-colour background. This makes it trivial to vectorise the result in Illustrator's Image Trace or Figma's plugins. If you want commercial use without IP worries, prefer Adobe Firefly.
Invent a fictional brand — a yoga studio, a small bakery, a finance app. Write three logo prompts for it in three different style families: flat vector mark, vintage badge emblem, and abstract geometric mark. Compare which feels truest to the brand.
Generate a brand mood board for the same fictional brand — eight to twelve images covering palette, texture, lifestyle, and feeling. None of these need to be logos. Notice how this set tells you more about the brand than any single logo could.
Take a successful real-world logo (Airbnb's Bélo, Slack's hash, the McDonald's arches). Write a prompt that would produce something with a similar feel — without copying it. This trains your descriptive-vocabulary muscle for the next time you brief a designer.
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