Getting 20 Logo Directions in an Hour With Ideogram
Not a finished logo. Twenty honest directions in sixty minutes, which is exactly what you need before you brief anyone, including yourself.
A logo process that starts with one designer's first draft starts with one direction. Ideogram flipped my process: I generate twenty cheap directions first, find the two that feel alive, and only then invest real design time. The whole exploration phase costs about an hour.
The prompt structure that works for exploration: describe the company in one sentence, then specify a style family and a constraint. 'Minimalist geometric mark for a hiking app, single color, works at 16 pixels' is a direction. 'Cool logo for my app' is a slot machine. Run four style families: geometric, letterform-based, emblem/badge, and something deliberately weird that you generate only to learn what you do not want.
Ideogram's text handling is the reason it wins this job over every other image model. Wordmarks and name-inside-the-lockup explorations render with real, legible letters, which means direction includes typography instead of dodging it. Most attempts still need cleanup, but you are evaluating shapes, not squinting at gibberish.
Expect the yield honestly: of twenty, most are unusable, four or five are interesting, one or two survive contact with a favicon size. That is a good hour. The failures are not waste either; showing myself why the badge family felt corporate-killed that direction in minutes instead of in a paid revision round.
The output is not a logo, and treating it as one is the failure mode. The output is a brief with taste attached: the surviving directions, the color that kept recurring, the weight of line that feels right. Hand that to a designer, or to your next focused Ideogram session, and the actual design work starts from somewhere instead of from nothing.