AI is genuinely enough for most small businesses at the start, and it’s a considerable improvement on the alternative many actually choose, which is nothing coherent at all. Where a designer earns their fee is at three specific points: when the brand is the product and distinctiveness is your competitive advantage; when you’re about to spend serious money on physical assets like vehicle livery, shopfronts, packaging runs or embroidered workwear, where the cost of getting it wrong dwarfs the design fee; and when you need a genuinely original mark with clear ownership. A sensible middle path many businesses take is to use AI to explore directions and produce a working identity, then bring a designer in later with a clear brief — which costs less than starting from scratch because you’ve already made the decisions. And if budget is the constraint, a strong wordmark set in a good typeface, spaced properly, beats a mediocre symbol every time.

Two or three colours and two typefaces, which is fewer than most people build and considerably easier to apply consistently. Practically: one primary colour that does most of the work, one dark neutral for text, and optionally one accent used sparingly for buttons and highlights. Add white or off-white as your background and you have everything you need. For type, one face for headings and one for body text — or honestly, one good face used at different weights, which is a legitimate and often better choice for a small business because it removes a decision. The reason to restrain yourself is that every additional colour and face is another opportunity for drift: with five colours nobody remembers which is for what, and things get picked by eye. Also check that your primary colour has enough contrast against white for text to be readable, since accessibility matters and a pale brand colour used for body copy is genuinely hard to read.

Probably, but the sources genuinely disagree and it depends on jurisdiction and specifics — which is why the practical advice is to do the three things that hold up either way. The majority position is that trade mark law asks whether a mark is distinctive and used in commerce rather than who authored it, so an AI-generated logo can be registered like any other. A minority view holds that lack of human authorship is a barrier. What isn’t disputed is that copyright is separate and that purely AI-generated work generally doesn’t attract it, meaning no exclusivity. So: modify the output meaningfully and document what you changed, register your brand name as a word mark since that’s often the more valuable protection anyway, and run a clearance search before filing. If the brand is worth defending, pay an IP solicitor for an hour — and bear in mind that most published guidance on this topic comes from companies selling logo services.

Five things, and you can have them by this evening for nothing. A name you’ve checked properly. A wordmark — your name set in a good typeface, spaced well, exported as vector and PNG. Two colours with the hex codes written down. One typeface used consistently everywhere. And five voice rules including a list of words you’ll never use. That’s a genuine identity, and applied consistently across your website, profiles, invoices and social it will look more professional than most competitors managing a fancier logo inconsistently. Everything else — a symbol, an accent colour, illustration style, photography direction — is refinement you can add when you know more about your market. What matters far more than sophistication at this stage is that every touchpoint matches. Spend your effort on the audit in Step 7 rather than on a sixth colour, because inconsistency is what actually reads as amateurish.