Educ-AI-tion Week: How I used Generative AI to create a logo

By Dave Holloway

Our new online resource 'My Digital Induction: A Guide to the Apps and Software You Will Use at the University of Sheffield" is aimed at all new and returning students to help them understand the wealth of tools they will use during their time as students.

The resource was to be significantly promoted to staff and students and, as such, needed a logo to help identify it. This is how I utilised AI to help me create it.

Since the logo I was creating was to be representational of the online and digital world of a physical university, I knew I wanted it to feature both of those elements. Finding original images that represent 'online' or 'digital' or 'virtual' is never easy as the selection is quite limited, so I turned to AI image generation tools to help me come up with something a little more bespoke. The tool I used was Adobe Firefly, which is available to staff as part of the Adobe Creative Suite.

Initially I was just looking for inspiration, so I tried generating a few ideas combining common elements of online university study. The text accompanying each image below is the image prompt that I used.

Example prompt: ‘architectural illustration of a laptop under construction. colourful. part built. schematic. half finished. white background.]’

Example prompt: illustration of a laptop shaped building in the centre of a university campus. the laptop shaped building is under construction.

Example prompt: ‘an illustration of a giant laptop surrounded by red brick university buildings. White background.’

All of these weren't particularly inspiring or, even, very good - however there was one accidental image that I quite liked; one of the images it had generated had shown a redbrick university on a laptop screen with the building exceeding the edges of the screen. I tried to describe this and enter it as an image prompt but the results threw up a style I didn't think worked.

Instead, I returned to the first image that had inspired me, used a 'describe' feature which reverse engineers an image prompt to get an exact description of the picture.

Example prompt: ‘A vector illustration of an open laptop with the screen showing the red brick college building on campus, the building sticks out of the edges of the screen. white background, simple design, bold outlines, high resolution, no text or letters in picture, no shadows.’

I now had plenty of choices, but the problem is that this building was any old red brick university building and not a University of Sheffield red brick building. Firth Court is Sheffield's signature academic building and one which many new students will recognise, so I felt that was an important one to use. I went through the University's Asset Bank and found some official photos of the building that I liked.

I uploaded those images into Adobe Firefly and generated some illustrations that resembled Firth Court, eventually settling on one which matched the style of the laptop I had generated and had a similar perspective:

After that, it was a matter of bringing all the elements together into Photoshop. I cut out my laptop image, imported the new university illustration, extended it beyond the edges of the screen and did some colour correction to make the image on the screen 'pop' a little more. Finally, I generated a mobile device in the same style and added that to the logo.