Cloud Glance's logo is generated by OpenAI's DALL-E

24 Nov 2022
Written by: Rehan van der Merwe

I have been procrastinating the redesign, or well, getting someone else to design an actual logo for Cloud Glance. I picked the previous one at namecheap for free without much thought. Back then the app was still called Boundaries and then "put everything into boxes"/compartmentalize was the vision.

Like all clients, I obviously did not know exactly what I want, just that it needs to be something with a cloud and maybe an eye to represent the glancing part of the name. If I can't even describe it to myself how am I going to describe it to someone else and not to mention the iteration they would have to go through until I finally give the sign-off.

Hiring a designer sounded like an expense, that I could afford, but didn't really want to since Cloud Glance isn't a paid product for the considerable future at least. I remembered seeing DALL-E in the news a few times and figured I will give it a try and see if it comes up with something cool, iteration will surely be faster and provide a wider variety of options.

In total, it took me about ~30 minutes to sing-up, read the docs and write some code to call the API. Believe it or not, the very first image was the one! After that, it just got worse 😂.

The code

Create a new folder, an NPM repo and install the openai package.

npm init
npm install openai

Then create a JS script with the contents below, fill in your API key, prompt text and run the script.

const { Configuration, OpenAIApi } = require("openai");

const configuration = new Configuration({
  apiKey: "sk-XXXX" // Go to the API keys section to generate yours https://beta.openai.com/account/api-keys
});

async function main()
{
  const openai = new OpenAIApi(configuration);
  const response = await openai.createImage({
    prompt: "<YOUR DESCRIPTIVE TEXT HERE>",
    n: 1, //Change this to return more than 1 image at a time
    size: "1024x1024",
  });

  for(let resp of response.data.data)
    console.log(resp.url);
}

main().catch(err => console.error(err));

Results

The prompt: futuristic neon cloud eye logo produced this image on the very first iteration and I was blown away.

I have no idea what text that is, most likely the representation of "a language" according to the DALL-E. I cropped the logo part manually and added some round corners to produce the final logo.

Doing a reverse image search also showed promising results, this was truly a unique logo.

After this first hit wonder, I continued to rerun the script to see what it will produce, and it just produced some horrible results 😂🤷.‍️

I created the cover image for the How to get AWS credentials(temporary) for IAM User, Role and SSO with scripts blog with DALL-E as well, it took a few more iterations but this prompt cloud, authentication, futuristic, high quality produced this image. I think going forward I will use DALL-E for all my blog cover images.

Cost

I have not even used the free credits that I got after signing up.

Conclusion

DALL-E is a game changer, it probably won't replace any designers soon, but for a once-off like this, it is perfect for creating unique images for quick iteration.

There is an openai.createImageVariation(...) function that I would have started to call as soon as it created an image close to what I wanted. But I could never even test this as I just continue to hit the generate button to see what it comes up with next.

Honestly, this is a service that I would pay for after the trial expires, really impressed! Really happy "client" here that loves their new logo.

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