Art & Design

I agree there's a lot of design repetition throughout the AI logo ecosystem. It's almost as if the leadership of these companies did something asinine like use AI to generate a new logo, which would guarantee that they all look similar. But that would be stupid, right? And CEOs aren't stupid, lazy, and tight-fisted, right?

However, I'm not here to speculate about how useless CEOs are, or whether of you put a bunch of morons in a room together, they unsurprisingly make moronic decisions, or whether any executives reading this will huff and puff about how they aren't useless leeches making decisions about a business involving technology they don't understand. No, I'm here to quibble about terminology.

Hexagons are, indeed, the bestagons. However, few of these logos in this graphic are hexagons, and most don't even resemble hexagons.

1. ... is. Vaguely, but technically, yes.
2. is a circle. Maybe a Möbius strip, but not a hexagon.
3. Is an octagon
4. Is another Möbius strip circle
5. Is another circle. You might argue that it could be a dodecagon, because it has 12 leaves, but again: not a hexagon.
6. Finally, a true, unambiguous hexagon.
7. Another hexagon!
8. A circle (or maybe an octagon), stealing the styling of #7. However, the void center does form a hexagon, so I'll count it - even though the void center of 6 is a circle.
9. Another true hexagon. Now we're rolling! Containing a circle made from the stroke design in #6, and containing yet another circle.
10. My favorite. Not only a hexagon on the outside and inside, but offset by 60°
11. Breaks the run. Back to circles, this time containing a square. Nothing hexa- about it.
12. A circle, containing a circle. There are 6 segments in the stroke also used by #6 and #9, but it's still not a hexagon; just unoriginal.
13. Another circular Möbius strip, although the interior does form a hexagon.

Observations:

• They really missed their chance at some symmetry at a neat dozen, which is at least related to hexagons by being a multiple of 6, by having 13 logos (excluding DeepSeek).
• Of 13 logos, a smidge over half (7) have a hexagon in them somewhere; 2 of those are because of the shape of the empty space at the center of the logo, so fewer than half of the logos (5) are actually hexagonal in shape.
• More logos (9) contain elements of circles than contain elements of hexagons.
• Möbius strips show up a few times
• Several (7) use a 6-segment, 2-strand, vaguely Celtic braid

There is a fantastic amount of re-use of style in these.

The first logo is actually either 3 interlocking ovals, or two interlocked distorted triangles (with hidden bends); it's interesting, topologically.

Hexagons do recur, but the title:

new logo trend: the swirling hexagon

is inaccurate as over half the logos contain no hexagonal elements. They all do tend to swirl, and most are symmetric. It's have been more accurate to say "the swirling circle", or "the celtic knot".

It's hard to believe that most of these weren't generated by AI; few are actually unique (#5) and share almost no element of another.