Dream Society Identity

Last year – 2024 – my old colleague and friend Brett Foraker got in touch, asking me to come up with a logo for his new agency. Dream Society is a boutique creative agency, comprising a global set of world-class creatives, working to ‘push boundaries and make the impossible look easy’. AI is to play a significant role. Dream Society makes its own work and collaborates with ad agencies, production companies, commercial clients and artists.

Brett suggested that I might use AI as part of the logo design process. I had been getting interested in the creative use of AI, having attended a great course run by Martin Gent, so I thought why not try to answer a real, live brief with this new technology. I was really curious to see how it would feel. Here is what happened.

Brett and I felt that the logo should lean away from the futuristic and technological visual clichés associated with AI. The name felt human, not robotic, and it had something of the 60s about it. With these considerations in mind, I started writing prompts for the AI platform Midjourney. Enjoyable chaos ensued. Nothing was right, but I escaped the tyranny of the blank page pretty quickly.   

AI seemed to be less advanced with logos than in other areas like photography and voice generation. The platforms which dealt specifically with logo design could certainly create professional looking marks, but these marks were far from unique. A company like Dream Society needed a logo which communicated its very own complexion, something appropriate, clever and original, speaking of a company at the pinnacle of creative endeavour. It seemed like a better idea to work with an AI platform like Ideogram which was not exclusively about logos but which was known to be better than the rest with typography. 

A few of the AI drawings from Midjourney and Ideogram were interesting. But developing these drawings using the AI platforms felt like doing Japanese calligraphy with a door painting brush. I turned to pen and paper.  

I made some mood boards to capture some of the stylistic and conceptual areas that were emerging in my chats with Brett. This was about focussing the thinking and also about looking at helpful past examples of art and design. AI didn’t play a part in this phase of the work.

One of the areas I was capturing in the mood boards related to one of Dream Society’s initial projects – an AI editorial piece called ‘SmokeShow’. This project had got us thinking about dreams and consciousness and tangentially, clouds. The simplified cloud graphics in the mood boards started to suggest infographical versions of a brain. It felt like there might be an elegant way to sum up the whimsical and technical sides of the company by overlapping the cloud and the brain concepts. 

These ideas could of course be visualised in a million ways. By referencing a couple of artists – Keith Haring and Kaws, Brett helped me to feel the atmosphere that he wanted for his logo: something quite clean and graphic, and also a little light-hearted. 

I started writing prompts to see if AI could help me create a simple mark that would communicate these concepts and moods. 

The most interesting of the latest AI drawings came as a result of a simple prompt: ‘A minimal graphic icon of a brain. The letters ‘D’ and ‘S’ are integrated into the folds of the brain.’ Ideogram drew some weird icons which seemed to show the brain from the top and the side at the same time. 

Despite this error, I felt that these drawings had the essence of what was needed: a friendly shape which effortlessly suggested clouds and the brain. I liked the bold simplicity of the two hemispheres. The addition of the letters really made this mark belong to Dream Society. 

Brett liked this concept too, so it was time to look at execution, considering typefaces, colour, the drawing of the brain/cloud and its relationship with the type. I felt that AI would be too blunt an instrument for this kind of work, so I proceeded with my usual combination of sketchpad and Adobe Illustrator. 

When it came to looking at the colour, Brett described the kind of sensibility he had in mind and I turned to Khroma – another AI platform – for some artificial colour intelligence. Like Midjourney and Ideogram, it generated lots to react to. Here are some of the colour combinations that I thought might be right.

And so the final Dream Society logo, along with the DS Labs and the web URL versions. 

It’s funny – I first wrote this conclusion a few months ago, and I talked about AI still being pretty crude in the world of logo design. Over the past six months, it has developed quickly and it has become a lot less crude! But it is still the case that AI cannot solve complex branding questions, and it is still unable to judge what is beautiful, clever, original or appropriate.

I do find AI to be an exciting collaborator. On this project it helped me to consider lots of avenues within the time available and it threw ‘good weird’ things into the mix – surprising curve-balls which helped me to get to a distinctive solution.

I like what Brett said: “At the end of the day, AI is a tool. I like to say it’s the most powerful creative tool since the pencil. But like a pencil, it all depends on who is holding it.”

“Matt has always been a trusted friend and colleague and as such has a unique ability to translate my abstractions into something tangible.”

Brett Foraker, Founder of Dream Society