By Bogdan Rancea
Creating a compelling brand isn’t easy. Before you can even start differentiating your company from the competition with a unique personality, messaging strategy, and approach to customer service, you first need a “visual” identity that resonates with your target audience.
Your logo, color palette, business cards and social media graphics all play a crucial role in shaping how customers perceive your company. Unfortunately, not every business owner has thousands of dollars to spend on a logo and other brand design services.
That’s where platforms like Brandmark.IO come in, giving entrepreneurs simple, cost-effective tools for creating essential assets.
The question is, is Brandmark.io worth your time (and money), or would you be better off using a competing solution, like Canva, Looka, or Tailor Brands?
Quick Verdict and Pros and Cons
Brandmark.io is a convenient and user-friendly solution for designing logos and various other business assets.
It gives you access to flexible templates, a font generator, AI-powered resources and more. However it does have some downsides, like relatively generic graphics.
Pros
- Easy-to-use interface that doesn’t require any design knowledge
- Powerful AI tools for generating color palettes, fonts, and more.
- Useful “ranking” feature to help you evaluate the quality of your logo.
- Cost-effective pricing (comparable to solutions like Looka).
- Excellent customer service and support.
- Wide range of customizable templates for different assets, like business cards, brand style guides, and letterheads.
Cons
- Some of the logos generated by AI are pretty generic.
- Limited options for fonts, colors, shapes, and styles.
- Lacks advanced image generation tools (unlike competitors like Canva).
The Features
Brandmark.io’s best-known feature is it’s AI-powered logo generator. However, the solution can actually do a lot more than just generate logos.
Business owners and creators can also use Brandmark to design business cards, color palettes, letterheads, presentation templates and more.
The key features of the platform include:
Logo designer
The logo design tool offered by Brandmark is very similar to what you’d get from other competing solutions, like Looka.
All you need to do is enter a few details (like your business name, and some keywords describing your brand), and the AI system will generate a selection of customizable “logo samples” for you.
Brand asset templates
As mentioned above, once you’ve designed a logo with Brandmark (or uploaded your existing logo), you can use it to create social profile icons, business cards, animated designs, letterhead templates, presentations, brand guides, and social media assets. You can also export your assets in a range of formats (such as PNG, EPS, SVG, and PDF).
Professional customization
Unlike most competing logo and brand asset design companies, Brandmark offers access to specialists who can help you customize your logo.
All you need to do is reach out to the team and ask for help if you need assistance adjusting certain assets, colors and shapes, and they’ll handle the hard work for you.
AI color wheel
The AI color wheel from Brandmark automatically colorizes logos, wireframes, graphical art, and illustrations to match your color palette. You can even use it to create a new color palette for your brand. Just upload an image, and the AI system will suggest color options you can use.
Logo rank
If you already have a logo and you’re not sure how effective it’s going to be for your brand, you can upload it to Brandmark directly. An AI system will examine your logo and give you a “score” based on things like legibility, color and contrast, uniqueness, and overall visual appeal.
Logo Crunch
The Logo Crunch tool from Brandmark uses computer vision to make a high-res logo look fantastic in lower resolutions. You can use it to create a favicon for your website, app icon for Android or iOS, and create new versions of your design.
Font Generator
If you’re struggling to choose the right typefaces for your website, app, or branded assets, the Brandmark Font Generator can help. You can enter a few “starting fonts”, and the system will automatically recommend accent, title, and body fonts that match your brand aesthetic perfectly.
Brandmark.io Pricing and Fees
Similar to many of the logo design tools I’ve reviewed in the past, Brandmark.io allows users to get started for free.
You don’t need to pay anything to sign up for an account, and you can begin experimenting with color palettes and logo designs instantly. The only time you’ll need to pay anything is when you’re ready to download and use your logo.
If you just want to download a basic “low resolution” version of your logo, in PNG format, that will cost you $25. Notably, you can make unlimited customizations to your logo after you create it on this plan, and still access plenty of support from the design team.
If you want access to more features, there are two higher-tier plans:
- Designer: $65: Full access to logo source files, business card designs, brand style guides, Facebook cover images, letterhead designs, profile and app icons, and more.
- Enterprise: $175: All the features of the Designer package, plus 10 fully original concepts created by the Brandmark design team.
The prices are on-par with what you’d expect from a tool like Looka, and they all include full copyright access, so you’ll be free to use your logo without worrying about any infringement issues.
Brandmark.io Review: Ease of Use and Customer Support
Ultimately, Brandmark.io isn’t the most advanced “design tool” available today, but it is easy to use. I managed to sign up for an account and create a variety of logos in a couple of minutes. I found the editing tools pretty easy to leverage too.
You can easily experiment with a range of colors and fonts, choose line and letter spacing options, and even change your logo’s layout with a couple of clicks.
Notably, however, I did notice that there aren’t a lot of options to browse through. You really only have access to a handful of icons and font choices for any logo you create.
Additionally, I noticed that the editor doesn’t prevent you from making changes that harm the legibility of your logo.
For instance, you can change the font’s “boldness” to a point where it’s basically unreadable.
I did like the fact that you can click on the “Ideas” button at any point to see suggestions about how you can adjust your colors, and fonts. Plus, you can also “duplicate” your logo and share it with your team members if you want some internal feedback.
Customer Support
The first thing I noticed about Brandmark’s approach to customer support is that there aren’t a lot of self-service resources you can access.
Unlike other companies (such as Canva), Brandmark doesn’t have a blog page, although there is chatbot you can access to ask questions.
If you want to connect with a member of the support team, the only option available is email. Notably though, the team will help you with various tasks, like customizing your logo to match your vision. If you’re using the “Enterprise” plan, they’ll also create logo design concepts for you.
Brandmark.io Review: The Verdict
Brandmark is a simple tool for logo design and brand asset creation. It offers access to some handy AI-powered tools, as well as some unique features you won’t find elsewhere, like a logo ranking system. Plus, I love the fact that you can get dedicated design support from the Brandmark team.
However, compared to some of the other solutions I’ve tried, like Looka, Canva, and Tailor Brands, Brandmark.io does seem a little basic.
I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re looking for a completely unique logo design (unless you’re willing to pay for the Enterprise plan).
Most of graphics and assets available are pretty generic, and there are limitations to how much you can really customize your logo. Still, if you’re looking for a cost-effective and straightforward tool for logo design, Brandmark.io might be a good choice.
