ChatGPT, General, Hockey, New Product, News
Uncle Sam: 30 ChatGPT Hockey Jerseys in 30 Days
May
The What
Welcome to the thirteenth installment in the series! Day 13 of 30. This particular concept revolved around a team we dubbed the ‘Uncle Sam‘.
How We Prompted ChatGPT
This one took a lot of ‘direction’. Here’s the exact prompt we used to get the logo image you see within this post.
‘I want to make a logo for a hockey team called ‘Uncle Sam’ – want it to be a mascot logo in a vintage/modern style. Do not include a crest, just the mascot as described. For the logo mascot, please make it look like the iconic Uncle Sam propaganda where he’s pointing at ‘you’ image but playing ice hockey. He should be wearing clothing that is synonymous with the images from that time period. The hand where he is pointing can be regular human hand without the hockey glove, the hand holding the hockey stick should be in a hockey glove. His hockey socks can have vertical red stripes top to bottom. Should be wearing ice hockey skates, ice hockey gloves, and holding a hockey stick. The glove that he is not wearing, can be at the bottom of the composition by his feet. Drape an American flag on his shoulders as well. Colors should be what you expect from Americana. Please only use a maximum of 4 to 5 hex colors for the logo. Logo only, don’t include the text please. Color should be clean sharp/smooth and polished, not grainy or mottled.’
Links to the prompt exchange history:
For most use cases, we went with the minimal mascot style logo direction. ChatGPT knows what this is and will mimic the style pretty well. This ensures flat and clean lines with no shading or soft edges. That’s important, we’ll explain why. The final artwork needs to be this way so that we can create a vector image out of the PNG file that ChatGPT provides to you after it renders your ideas. We take the file and load it into a vectorization tool (we recommend vectorizer.ai and Vector Magic to accomplish this on your own – otherwise we can do that step for you after you order – you’re also free to explore other options) to separate the shapes into vectors so that we can colorize freely. This also ensures that we are able to scale the artwork without the loss of resolution. More on that here.
You can request a crest shape to act as a container for your logo, or explicitly ask to not include one. At times we asked for no crest shape since we wanted to have control on that piece on our end after the logo is created. You can also prompt ChatGPT for suggestions – it can really help steer your creative direction.
Be sure to direct the prompt with specific information if you have it – like what sort of emotion you want, what pose, overall shape, and what items the logo should have (i.e. hockey gloves, hockey skates, hockey stick, etc.).
For text, it does a decent job with rendering it out – you will likely experience some anomalies and artifacts with the text, it’s improved in this regard immensely in the time we started using to now. You can choose to let it be generated or to exclude it – just be sure to know what you want to do going into it. We suggest going without it first and adding it when requesting revisions. Experimenting will obviously get you better and better results as you learn how best to get what you want.
Ask for colors you’d like to include. Give general direction with terms like primary, analogous, monochromatic, contrasting – you can even let ChatGPT pick them for you. It’s good to limit the total number of colors in the logo as well – this helps for many reasons. Results in a cleaner file and better contrast. We recommend a maximum of 5-6 colors. Through some experimentation we found that adding the ‘no grain or mottled results’ in the prompt really helps to keep the final image from looking like it has a texture to it.
Final Uncle Sam Hockey Jersey Results/Product
For some reason, Uncle Sam kept showing up with a hockey stick that had two blades—funny, but definitely frustrating. Because of that, we had to start over several times and create a bunch of new prompts, since the ChatGPT canvas tool wasn’t solving the issue. This project ended up being a very iterative process. With each new version of the logo, we found ourselves coming up with fresh ideas or specific details we wanted to tweak to get it just right.
If you look closely at the gallery, you’ll notice ChatGPT consistently dropped the glove from the wrong hand—it did that almost every time. Luckily, it was an easy fix in Adobe Illustrator. We made a few modifications and creative choices (i.e. the star shaped crest) here and there, but the final artwork mostly sticks to what the A.I. generated. There were a few solid versions to choose from, but this is the one we ultimately went with. You can check out the other logo variations from that process in the gallery below. It wasn’t easy to pick a winner—we think this one’s a strong choice.
Just to reiterate what we’ve said in previous posts: this series is about exploring what’s possible, not replacing illustrators.
As a reminder, we’re dropping a new design concept every day! Be sure to check out the growing collection, order your favorites, and let us know what you think. Feel free to share your own results too!
