[dreamfactory2]

You need someone creative to generate the good ideas to be used in the first place.

Random mutation and A/B would surely take millenia, even assuming huge traffic in the first place. And even then, one of the internal criticisms of A/B at Amazon was that it helped refine local optima (e.g. a next button in a checkout cart) but is weak on a holistic view (whole page, user experience), and making larger innovative jumps (which is where you end up getting swallowed by your competition of course).

Of course, you could just think of a seasoned creative as a really powerful software/hardware combo, with AI and heuristics light years ahead, and cheap at the price.

[prawn]

(My sympathy stems from me doing a lot of design work so I'm not approaching this from a "design is useless" aspect.)

Do you think that what's out there already could serve as a fairly good starting place? Run them past users to work out which out of thousands of logos are effective. Then isolate components (marks, text, etc) and test those, plus random combinations of the same.

I can appreciate the value in very high level brand creation, but I also think you can get 90% of the way there at 1% of the budget for many businesses. A remotely competent designer can slap down a shape and choose a font for the text and beat half the small business logos out there in a few minutes.

[dreamfactory2]

Not really, for two reasons:

1. You don't have the users to test yet.

2. This is what really makes it untenable - what is the logo for, what does effective mean, 90% of where? This is why brand creation is expensive as hell. There's a lot of work involved and by definition it is bespoke and without shortcuts. That's the whole point or it wouldn't be brand creation in any sense. When you see a logotype, it's just the tip of the iceberg.

I suspect that a lot of people might think of branding as including these cheap services where an underpaid young offshore photoshop whizz throws together an infinity symbol, dolphin, or generic swoosh and even goes so far as to hand kern some text (and bear in mind that even this kind of junior typographic task can't be automated yet).

I would argue that this isn't a ghetto version of the kind of branding that a large company does, but a cargo cult version. The logotype part is highly visible but is the tiniest component of branding - it is superficial and meaningless in isolation. Very much unlike this process, real branding is about discovering and generating an extremely high input of info and ideas and turning this into a very small and focused output, articulating the essence. (And of course a big part of the cost for a large org is that you often need to cover things like web, print, letterheads, reports, sides of trucks, and so on. All whilst maintaining brand consistency.)

Assuming you can't afford to pay for full branding, I think the best solution is to do just enough (e.g. many here might just need something for digital and business cards) and for it to be done by someone close to the company owner of even the owner themselves, as they will live and breathe what the company is for and what makes it distinct. Even poorly executed, this will communicate a much clearer story and have real value imo (trying to avoid the word authentic here but it's probably applicable).