The Design of A.I. Identities ⇥ techcrunch.com

Speaking of A.I. and design, I enjoyed Devin Coldewey’s look, for TechCrunch, at the brand and icon design of various services:

The thing is, no one knows what AI looks like, or even what it is supposed to look like. It does everything but looks like nothing. Yet it needs to be represented in user interfaces so people know they’re interacting with a machine learning model and not just plain old searching, submitting, or whatever else.

Although approaches differ to branding this purportedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-doing intelligence, they have coalesced around the idea that the avatar of AI should be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. […]

Gradients and gentle shapes abound — with one notable exception.

See Also: Brand New has reviews of the identities for OpenAI’s DevDay and Perplexity — both paywalled.