by Steve
permalink · published: Jul 3, 2017 · updated: Jun 28, 2023
logos icons pictograms logo mark

I've always wanted to include pictures, icons, and pictograms in my logo maker. I don't have the skills or time to design thousands of icons myself and hiring someone to design icons for me turned out to be way too expensive. I looked into licensing icon sets, but it was too complicated. I decided to try to generate pictograms using computer programs.

About a year ago I had the idea of generating icons (pictograms) from random noise. The idea was to use a convolutional neural network (CNN) and iterate until something recognizable was generated. The problem was it took forever and the CNN wasn't trained on sketch data, so it only identified things as crossword puzzles, spreadhsheets, and other pixely-looking things.

In May 2017 I got lucky and Google released a HUGE, detailed dataset of sketches. I played with the data and managed to generate some half decent looking icons.

These icons aren't incorporated into the logo maker yet, but after a little more tweaking and testing they will be...