How to Use the Erlich Text-to-Image Model to Generate Logos with AI

Crafting an effective brand identity is paramount to any startup or project. The hallmark of your brand identity? A significant and compelling logo. But the journey of brainstorming to final design can be time-consuming.

That's where Erlich comes in, a new AI model created by LAION research lab that allows you to instantly generate logo ideas through text descriptions.

Like most other generative AI models, using Erlich is simple: Describe the style you want, and Erlich produces tailored logo mockups.

This unlocks new flexibility for you to:

• Rapidly explore diverse design styles by generating logos for descriptions like “a minimalist mark with abstract geometric shapes.”
• Visualize early ideas before manual creation to evaluate what resonates. For example: our name Chai Tea LCC in a modern serif font.
• Iterate easily by tweaking prompts to home in on an impactful design direction.
• Expand creativity by leveraging Erlich's broad visual range from retro to modern, abstract to literal.

This lets you consider far more concepts than manual approaches permit. By handling the brainstorming process, Erlich helps you discover stronger visual identities sooner.

Erlich uses an AI technique called latent diffusion. It's trained on a huge dataset of logos and corresponding text captions. Erlich takes your text prompt and generates logo images matching the description.

This technology allows Erlich to render logos in any style you can describe.

Erlich shines during the early logo exploration phase. Some valuable use cases include:

• Brainstorming to rapidly gather diverse ideas, which drives more creative refinement later. Style research by comparing different treatments of the same idea, like “sleek and modern” vs “retro 70s” versions of your name.
• Concept validation by mocking up logo ideas to evaluate their look before manual creation.
• Mood boards to collect logo visuals representing vibes like “whimsical” or “authoritative” for inspiration.
• Design feedback by testing descriptions against Erlich to see if it conveys your intent before starting manual work.

These applications help projects engage in the crucial activity of aligning visuals with their mission and values early in the branding process.

In order to interact with the Erlich AI model effectively, we have a list of input variables we can send it, these can be adjusted to help fine tune what is returned.

• prompt: The textual description of the logo you want to generate.
• negative: An optional parameter to negate specific aspects of the generated logo.
• init_image: An optional initial image for the model's prediction.
• mask: An optional mask image for inpainting the init image.
• guidance_scale: A value that guides the model's prediction towards the caption. default: 5
• steps: Number of diffusion steps to run. default: 50
• width and height: Target dimensions for the logo image. default for both: 256
• init_skip_fraction number: Fraction of sampling steps to skip when using an init image.
• aesthetic_rating: Parameters to guide the aesthetic aspects of the output. default: 9
• aesthetic_weight: Aesthetic weight (0-1). How much to guide towards the aesthetic embed vs the prompt embed. default: 0.5
• seed: Seed for the random number generator. default: -1
• intermediate_outputs: Whether to return intermediate outputs. Enable to visualize the diffusion process and/or debug the model. May slow down inference. default: 4
• batch_size: Batch size. (higher = slower). default: 4

In return, based on batch_size, Erlich returns a number of images matching what it the batch size was set to, by default 4 images.

Time to get hands-on with Erlich and generate distinctive logo designs. But first, you'll need a Replicate account, which you can get for free.

To get started, you'll need to install the replicate nodejs package, which lets you use the Erlich model via the Replicate API.

pnpm i replicate

Next, let's write a very basic nodejs script that takes input in the prompt variable and outputs 4 logos:

import Replicate from "replicate";

const REPLICATE_API_TOKEN = 'YOUR-REPLICATE-API-TOKEN';

const replicate = new Replicate({
  auth: REPLICATE_API_TOKEN,
});

const output = await replicate.run(
  "laion-ai/erlich:92fa143ccefeed01534d5d6648bd47796ef06847a6bc55c0e5c5b6975f2dcdfb",
  {
    input: {
      prompt: `paper plane logo with shadow of plane flying around the world, logo, vector`,
      negative: `avoid the color red`,
    }
  }
);

console.log(output);

It will output an array of four image URLs similar to below:

[
  [
    'https://pbxt.replicate.delivery/RandomNonsenseNumbersAndCharacters1234/ts_49-batch_0.png',
    'https://pbxt.replicate.delivery/RandomNonsenseNumbersAndCharacters4321/ts_49-batch_1.png',
    'https://pbxt.replicate.delivery/RandomNonsenseNumbersAndCharacters1324/ts_49-batch_2.png',
    'https://pbxt.replicate.delivery/RandomNonsenseNumbersAndCharacters4132/ts_49-batch_3.png'
  ]
]

Once Erlich churns out an array of images, your job is to review, evaluate and refine the designs to match your brand vision. You can tweak your initial prompt or introduce a negative to tell the model what to avoid.

Erlich stands out as a testament to AI's potential in enhancing the creative process during brand design. By generating logo concepts rapidly from textual prompts, Erlich equips projects with enhanced capabilities to design and iterate their visual identities.

Still, let's not forget that while Erlich can provide worthwhile inspiration, it's wise to manually refine the output to ensure that your logo aligns perfectly with your brand's essence and message.

Jump straight into the Erlich experience via the demo interface or extend the script provided here to inject more options into the experience. After all, they say the geek shall inherit the earth, right?