What’s an extra fee in this whole process? Well, it’s everything if you run a small business or just hate giving your money to a middle man. It’s another hand in your pocket that doesn’t need to be there.

With independent design, just getting people to cough up a down payment or first 30% of a job is hard, so ease of payment will really help… or maybe find out sooner that you’re getting jerked around. I personally find that as soon as there is any bit of money involved, projects are taken more seriously. What iPhone-loving creative wouldn’t want this accounting superpower? Enough rant, go check it out and follow ‘em on twitter.

An instant champion for this sort of generative process is a font called LAIKA. Its beauty isn’t seen in an end result, but a result that is forever free to be altered (though not always published). What is most surprising is that the results are not jarring, they are aesthetically comfortable to the viewer or creator. On the other end of the spectrum there are processes with frightful results, simply a different gestalt.

Check out generatorx.no, a good resource for indexing a lot of these kind of projects. Many of them looking very process oriented (not always pretty).

I can see generative design playing well with identities. The parameters of an identity are very simple and often consistent, so it is easy to swap out one consistency for a variable. For something as rigid as logo design, changing a color can damage the image a brand has worked so hard to build up, that is, unless it is defined dynamic elements. There are plenty of other opportunities to create consistency, even consistency in variables. A lot of brands already do this by specifying a variety of colors to be used in an identity, but again, static.

I look forward to seeing more of these works spring up, but stay small and practical within their own bounds.