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The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away. Amate

The biggest problem that I have with most AI posters is that they are too busy, you have to look for information instead of seeing it popping right away. Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. White background, the important info in big letters, maybe one clipart or to. So I'm not talking about how pro artists could make a better job, but even the small local non-profit used to produce better posters. Not in the sense of "better looking", but in the sense that they were more readable. At least the examples of this blog are more readable than what we usually see.

jcelerier 7d ago
Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?pseudoid=943AE081-1E9F-4158-A6AF-5FAE6EEE58B9&sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!
- icantevenhold 7d ago
  For what it’s worth i think the Bi Nuu poster you share here as reference for something badly designed looks really cool. Poster design like any visual or artistic field will always cater to conflicting individual tastes - for some it looks great, others hate it. I like Art Nouveau but a lot of stuff in that style looks kitschy to me.
- stymaar 7d ago
  > we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.
  - jcelerier 7d ago
    As I said, "Today's AI makes it look even worse". But the post makes me hopeful than in a couple years, actually good graphic design can come out from AI. It still looks terrible and AI even for the best posters it highlights, but noticeably less than the random ice cream or coffee shop where I live with fully ai-generated interior design, memorabilia and menus.
    - totallymike 6d ago
      I’d rather look at the most amateurish indie posters plastered all over a wall than waste even a second looking at machine-generated nonsense.
- wat10000 7d ago
  Your links are supposed to be examples of bad posters? They're awesome!
- deleted 6d ago
  [deleted]
ereiamjh 7d ago
This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy. I may do a V2 one of these days. Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ... To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less? Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.
- vintagevibe 7d ago
  Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers. So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing. It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
  - deleted 7d ago
    [deleted]
  - cruffle_duffle 7d ago
    I think this generalizes to a lot of professional work. LLMs are very good at satisfying the requirements you give them. They’re much worse at knowing which requirements should be challenged, reframed, or ignored because you don’t know enough about the field to know what actually matters. That’s why they’re such force multipliers for experts: the expert can spot when the model chose the wrong abstraction or checked every box and still produced something bad. A novice often can’t. I’d argue the model mostly raises the novice toward “average.” “Tell it to push back” doesn’t really solve this either. Too little and you get “aye aye captain!” Too much and you get Opus 5 / claudise, where it seems compelled to find something wrong with everything. I see this in a Home Assistant project I’ve mostly vibe coded. I can ask Codex to make the kitchen brighter on school days and it’ll happily implement something. But maybe an HA expert would say “you really shouldn’t model it this way.” Maybe they’d even question HA itself. The model could conceivably know that too, but it only sees a tiny slice of my world. There are infinite side quests it could raise, and a good professional’s real skill is knowing which one matters enough to interrupt you about and which 99% to silently ignore.
lifter3101 7d ago
> too busy, you have to look for information Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.
- eddythompson80 7d ago
  There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal. A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.
- enraged_camel 7d ago
  Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
- BobaFloutist 7d ago
  None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
- Gigachad 6d ago
  Those examples are filled with real info. The AI posters are filled with meaningless three word slogans, lists of meaningless copy and art where everything is labeled.
sir_brickalot 7d ago
The biggest problem in my view is: It's not editable by hand. There is no production data I could open in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (Layers) and change things to my or my clients liking.
- jostylr 7d ago
  You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
- wouldbecouldbe 7d ago
  It can probably ransform most to html.
- NinjaTrance 6d ago
  Wait 6 months...
- jrochkind1 6d ago
  I am not familiar with the field, but if there isn't a way to have LLM's generate graphics as editable InDesign or Illustrator files (maybe something Adobe will sell you?), I am sure there will be soon.
- NewLogic 6d ago
  This is a problem which is entirely solvable by existing and new design/production apps. Instead of working entirely with raster image agents should programmatically edit the target file format.
- ereiamjh 5d ago
  I think Canva Pro might do this - I dunno, I'm not paying for it. You can certainly ask ChatGPT for a poster, then ask it for a collection of assets with transparency, so you can composite them as you wish. It does take away from the "smash out a poster in 10 minutes" that a harried PTA volunteer wants, though. I suspect the tool to do this as a one-stop shop is coming very soon, though.
LelouBil 7d ago
That also reminds me of AI-generated text, which is also (when done without caring) barely readable because of the useless noise mixed the relevant information that a human that proofread the text would have thrown out.
- NinjaTrance 6d ago
  Technically, AI can introduce rounds of fact-checking, proofreading, etc. But even without that, AI-generated text is already better than what most humans can write -- particularly when they need something fast, cheap and good. (It might not be "excellent" -- but humans wouldn't be able to make it fast and cheap...)
Gigachad 6d ago
People act like making a poster is this absurd Sisyphean task that takes a degree in art to produce. You don’t need to hire an artist, you don’t need AI. Just download Affinity for free, find a nice font and color palate, and put text on the page. I’ve done my own event posters and they take less than an hour to produce with next to zero prior experience and look massively more appealing than AI slop.
- NinjaTrance 6d ago
  Using a tool where you only fill the blanks in some generic templates made by other humans sounds awfully a lot like what AI already does...
frgturpwd 6d ago
> Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.

jcelerier 7d ago

Well what's better ? I have so many pictures of posters of old events or storefronts saved on my phone because they were so astronomically bad it'd have been better to not have any poster at all. Today's AI makes it look even worse but I'm hopeful that in five years we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?pseudoid=943AE081-1E9F-4158-A6AF-5FAE6EEE58B9&sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... because the cost of making things enjoyable with more colour and detail will have come down. Maybe we can finally go back to Art Nouveau if the cost of making it comes down!

icantevenhold 7d ago
For what it’s worth i think the Bi Nuu poster you share here as reference for something badly designed looks really cool. Poster design like any visual or artistic field will always cater to conflicting individual tastes - for some it looks great, others hate it. I like Art Nouveau but a lot of stuff in that style looks kitschy to me.
stymaar 7d ago
> we'll all live in a world generally more agreeable to look at and not "concrete with pink and yellow fluo paper smashed on top of it" like https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/music-poster-wall.html or https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/france-poster-wall.html?ps... Sorry buf I'd take these posters over your “generally more agreeable ” homogeneous slop literally any day.
- jcelerier 7d ago
  As I said, "Today's AI makes it look even worse". But the post makes me hopeful than in a couple years, actually good graphic design can come out from AI. It still looks terrible and AI even for the best posters it highlights, but noticeably less than the random ice cream or coffee shop where I live with fully ai-generated interior design, memorabilia and menus.
  - totallymike 6d ago
    I’d rather look at the most amateurish indie posters plastered all over a wall than waste even a second looking at machine-generated nonsense.
wat10000 7d ago
Your links are supposed to be examples of bad posters? They're awesome!
deleted 6d ago
[deleted]

ereiamjh 7d ago

This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/ I realised that the prompts could be improved by asking for much less clutter. The best examples on there pick out one main visual subject, but many of them are too fussy. I may do a V2 one of these days. Clutter comes with the territory to some extent though. I was recently asked to do a real world PTA fayre poster, and the client (my wife) very firmly wanted 12+ attractions mentioned on the poster. Tombola, hook a duck, bar, BBQ, blah, blah, blah as well as date, location, sponsor, ... To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials. I don't know what pro designers do - convince the client to say less? Unless the prompt says otherwise, AI will try to get a visual element in for every single word too.

vintagevibe 7d ago
Pro designers are generally paid because they’re extremely good editors. And they’re an intermediary between clients and their consumers. So when you put the capability in the hands of the client without the editing (or taste) and no way to evaluate the result, you get the passable, homogenous thing. It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter, which is why much of our aesthetic world is the way it is.
- deleted 7d ago
  [deleted]
- cruffle_duffle 7d ago
  I think this generalizes to a lot of professional work. LLMs are very good at satisfying the requirements you give them. They’re much worse at knowing which requirements should be challenged, reframed, or ignored because you don’t know enough about the field to know what actually matters. That’s why they’re such force multipliers for experts: the expert can spot when the model chose the wrong abstraction or checked every box and still produced something bad. A novice often can’t. I’d argue the model mostly raises the novice toward “average.” “Tell it to push back” doesn’t really solve this either. Too little and you get “aye aye captain!” Too much and you get Opus 5 / claudise, where it seems compelled to find something wrong with everything. I see this in a Home Assistant project I’ve mostly vibe coded. I can ask Codex to make the kitchen brighter on school days and it’ll happily implement something. But maybe an HA expert would say “you really shouldn’t model it this way.” Maybe they’d even question HA itself. The model could conceivably know that too, but it only sees a tiny slice of my world. There are infinite side quests it could raise, and a good professional’s real skill is knowing which one matters enough to interrupt you about and which 99% to silently ignore.

lifter3101 7d ago

> too busy, you have to look for information Have you ever seen a bus schedule, or a parking sign, or a list of events at a local library or an “open hours” sign at a restaurant? Those are 99.9% unreadable, busy, and you have to look for information. And even then it’s not always clear if you got it right. And that was all before the AI.

eddythompson80 7d ago
There is a difference between busy for no reason and busy because of information density. The busy examples in this article aren’t information dense. They just have a ton of different flower types, random animals, background characters, unrelated structures, many different colors and many different shades of those colors, etc. But the information they are trying to communicate is minimal. A bus schedule or a parking sign is very information dense. It’s trying to communicate a lot in a limited space and as a result require getting used to.
enraged_camel 7d ago
Bus schedules are not a good comparison because they have to fit a ton of information into a single page. And I disagree that they are unreadable. Speaking as someone who commuted by bus for years in many different cities, they tend to be quite easy to read because the tabular layouts make them very easy to scan quickly. Once your eyes anchor on the page, you can find what you're looking for without effort.
BobaFloutist 7d ago
None of those are primarily marketing tools, they're things you use after you've already decided you want to use the product. They don't need to grab and hold attention and convince you that they have what you want, they just need to convey information.
Gigachad 6d ago
Those examples are filled with real info. The AI posters are filled with meaningless three word slogans, lists of meaningless copy and art where everything is labeled.

sir_brickalot 7d ago

The biggest problem in my view is: It's not editable by hand. There is no production data I could open in InDesign, Illustrator or Photoshop (Layers) and change things to my or my clients liking.

jostylr 7d ago
You could try having, say Astra, use one of these programs via computer use to design it. I haven't tried it, but I hear it is really good at computer use. Might even have more of a dialogue as it creates, so dictating choices at each stage. Would take longer, but does not require someone who has expertise in the tool, just good design notion.
wouldbecouldbe 7d ago
It can probably ransform most to html.
NinjaTrance 6d ago
Wait 6 months...
jrochkind1 6d ago
I am not familiar with the field, but if there isn't a way to have LLM's generate graphics as editable InDesign or Illustrator files (maybe something Adobe will sell you?), I am sure there will be soon.
NewLogic 6d ago
This is a problem which is entirely solvable by existing and new design/production apps. Instead of working entirely with raster image agents should programmatically edit the target file format.
ereiamjh 5d ago
I think Canva Pro might do this - I dunno, I'm not paying for it. You can certainly ask ChatGPT for a poster, then ask it for a collection of assets with transparency, so you can composite them as you wish. It does take away from the "smash out a poster in 10 minutes" that a harried PTA volunteer wants, though. I suspect the tool to do this as a one-stop shop is coming very soon, though.

LelouBil 7d ago

That also reminds me of AI-generated text, which is also (when done without caring) barely readable because of the useless noise mixed the relevant information that a human that proofread the text would have thrown out.

NinjaTrance 6d ago
Technically, AI can introduce rounds of fact-checking, proofreading, etc. But even without that, AI-generated text is already better than what most humans can write -- particularly when they need something fast, cheap and good. (It might not be "excellent" -- but humans wouldn't be able to make it fast and cheap...)

Gigachad 6d ago

People act like making a poster is this absurd Sisyphean task that takes a degree in art to produce. You don’t need to hire an artist, you don’t need AI. Just download Affinity for free, find a nice font and color palate, and put text on the page. I’ve done my own event posters and they take less than an hour to produce with next to zero prior experience and look massively more appealing than AI slop.

NinjaTrance 6d ago
Using a tool where you only fill the blanks in some generic templates made by other humans sounds awfully a lot like what AI already does...

frgturpwd 6d ago

> Amateurs posters of before AI didn't have this problem. As someone who made posters in 2000, I respectfully disagree.