The logo for the Norwich Beer Festival has been unveiled. Designed by Jamie Fuller, a regular volunteer at the festival, the logo features an impression of The Halls, the venue the festival is returning to after three years while it was closed for structural repairs, and, as always, a dragon!
The logo will feature on all festival publicity and of course the souvenir glasses which will be available at the festival, which runs from October 26-31 – get your advance tickets here!
Jamie generated and then refined the logo using carefully worded text prompts to OpenAI’s ChatGPT image generation tool DALL·E.
EDIT
We are aware that there is some disappointment that AI has been used to help create this years logo.
Just to explain, we launched the annual logo competition in the same way we have done for many years, but the last time we had a competition, in 2023, the software didn’t exist, and we hadn’t considered it would be a factor with the competition this year.
We received fewer regular entries than normal, but some people who do usually enter and maybe aren’t the best designers had used AI this time. We also had several people enter for the first time who said they were only able to do a design with the help of AI.
Normally we are only looking for a concept, and we take that and, depending on the skill level of the competition winner we then either ask them to redesign it or we use a graphic designer to redo it. The final logo has been heavily redesigned compared with the original entry, more than any logo before.
As we hadn’t excluded AI from the competition rules, and several people told us they had wanted to enter but normally didn’t and had been able to with the help of AI, we decided this year to stick with the logo that won the competition. Rather than tell numerous people their entry was voided despite us not mentioning it in the rules.
Initially this logo got one of the most positive responses we have had in recent years, and we didn’t hide the fact that AI was involved.
For this year it is too late to change anything, but we will likely restrict its use in next year’s competition.
