
Logo Synthesis and Manipulation with Clustered Generative Adversarial Networks - relate
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04407
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jankovicsandras
This looks interesting, but the results are somewhat blurry.

Has anybody ever tried to use features of the logos (number of shapes, shape
size, position, color, curvature, shape parents/children, etc.) instead of raw
pixel data to train GANs?

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Jack000
I think logos are a tough problem for convnets because they're not very
compositional - ie. they're not made of heirarchically nested parts.

the space of logos is also probably not continuous - eg. there is a logo in
the latent space between nike and apple, but it's unlikely to be aesthetic.

~~~
posterboy
Nipple? Apik? Could be a sportswatch. There might be a few clusters along the
path through latent space (if that makes any sense, just skimmed the paper
mostly for the figures).

The attempt here seems to be really naive, I agree. But why are logos not
compositing? Coat of arms are frequently described in such a manner that would
allow to mix them. But then, the traditional artistic combinations of
different ones into new are not mere half way morphs. And a classic logo needs
to be compositional, because it's easier to perceive (decompose), e.g. hammer
and sickle. Scientific Icons are frequently using mathematical patterns and
plots, which tickle the eye in quite a different manner. I thought the nike
swoosh comes from that rather abstract direction, whereas the apple is quite
objective. Both are pictographs, but only the apple is a logo (from logos, ie.
speaking).

~~~
Jack000
there are logos that are compositional, but most logos are abstractive - eg.
the hammer and sickle logo only makes sense because we have prior knowledge of
what hammers and sickles look like. You could learn an abstract representation
of hammers from a dataset of hammers, but not from a dataset of logos.

I think GANs work best on images with hierarchical composition like human
faces.

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posterboy
These are iconographs, in the strict sense, not the full logos. The different
google Gs don't really speak for themselves. The Y combinator Y is really not
distinctive, either. The first few figures show fav- _icons_ , I'd thought.

~~~
relate
Hi, I'm one of the authors. That is correct in a strict sense, but we wanted
to focus on the more 'creative' part of logos rather than the text. GANs are
known to struggle with high resolutions, but we note that we show higher
resolution logos later in the paper (see page 12 and 15 e.g) which is trained
on the smaller but higher-resolution version of our dataset.

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ggggtez
This title should be changed to "Smudge Synthesis". Move along nothing to see
here. Actually the dataset of 600k logos is probably interesting. I bet
someone who had some time could do a hugely better job.

~~~
posterboy
I found interesting the identification of different clusters. Now do some
learning over the clusters. Letter cut out from colored shape seems to be the
most prominent feature, and the most boring one. But some of the shapes
(without cut-outs) are rather interesting. Some of the figures from he article
could become icons themselves, reminiscent of scientific plots (cf.
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Un...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b0/Uni_stuttgart_logo.svg/512px-
Uni_stuttgart_logo.svg.png)).

The problem is, a logo should be as unique as possible, so mechanical
derivatives aren't convincing

