I spent three hours trying to make a logo on a website and ended up with nothing

Starting with the assumption that free is enough

I was staring at the blank screen of my new shop dashboard, feeling that familiar weight of needing a logo. It wasn’t a huge deal, really, just a small operation I’m trying to set up. I looked at a few sites that offered free logo generation, thinking I could just type in a name and be done with it. The process felt so fast at first. I remember scrolling through those AI-generated options that pop up like instant toast. One service was pushing these templates that looked like they belonged on a bus exterior—something like the G-Bus signage I see around Yongin. It felt too corporate and sterile for what I wanted, but I kept clicking anyway.

The endless cycle of minor adjustments

Around the second hour, the frustration started to settle in. I tried to customize the typography for a project similar to how some pharmaceutical companies, like the one I saw at that Hallym Pharm facility in Yongin, use those sharp, clean lines in their branding. Every time I changed the font, the spacing looked weird. I thought about those big companies like Kakao Games moving their headquarters around or SKT hosting those events in the forest, and I realized how much branding is just an extension of trust. But here I was, fighting with a browser window that kept crashing every time I tried to export a high-resolution file. It cost zero dollars to use the tool, but the time I lost felt like it had a price tag of its own.

Getting caught on the small, useless details

I found myself obsessing over whether the icon looked too much like the Red Cross logo or if it accidentally mimicked some random local bus company’s branding. It’s funny how you start seeing logos everywhere when you’re desperate for one. I spent twenty minutes debating if the color blue was too ‘tech-startup’ or just right for a local business. The platform kept suggesting these generic house icons, which didn’t fit at all. It’s supposed to be simple, but it felt like I was trying to solve a puzzle with half the pieces missing. I even tried looking at how larger organizations handle their identity, but that just made my own attempt look even more amateurish.

Letting go of the perfect version

By sunset, I hadn’t made any real progress. I realized that the more I tweaked, the worse it looked. There was this lingering doubt—did I even need a perfect logo right now? Maybe a clean text-based placeholder would have been better than forcing an AI to dream up something that didn’t really represent my work. The whole experience was just exhausting. I eventually just closed the laptop and walked away from it entirely. I still don’t have a logo, and honestly, the store is still sitting there waiting for some kind of visual identity. I think I might just skip the whole ‘generate it yourself’ phase next time and find someone who actually knows how to use design software, even if it’s more expensive than I planned to spend.