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I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text. And AI can act

I think you need to remember that most people have no eye for design, and that includes even just presenting the essentials of an event in text. And AI can actually do it much better than the average idiot. Of they ask. Like, if you ask - "here's the event details, let's make a poster" in the right way, it's going to come back and say "you've supplied the venue name but not the street address, do you want to include that?". And then it'll lay the info out with generally sensible relative sizes and positions, better than the average idiot would. And, probably about equally as well as the average "I'm not a designer but I know a bit" amateur - and a lot faster. The catch there is that the idiot only gets this if their prompt is right - and since they're an idiot, it probably isn't. I think there's a gap in the market for a service with system prompts that make it work for people who don't think very hard. (That might be what, say, Canva Pro does with its AI features. I don't know because I'm not paying for that.)

nevertoolate 8d ago
So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?
- ereiamjh 8d ago
  That's a more interesting question than you might have intended it to be. A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works. The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities. But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before. For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.

nevertoolate 8d ago

So you want to reduce entropy by “fixing” semantic mistakes and hardcoding some design decisions “by the book” and end up with what exactly? The exact same poster everywhere?

ereiamjh 8d ago
That's a more interesting question than you might have intended it to be. A designer's job has two contradictory aspects. One is knowing the rules and following the rules. The other is having novel ideas, and breaking the rules when it works. The balance between those depends on the brief, and the designer's place in the ecosystem. For example the architect I paid to design my extension wasn't in the business having novel ideas - he designs well proportioned buildings in established styles, that work as living spaces, don't fall down, and get approved by planning authorities. But other architects are paid to design skyscrapers that look like nothing you've seen before. For a school fete poster, you're probably more in the first category - follow the rules. But you want to know where there's room for variety within those rules. Which is where the blog post starts - not every Spring fete poster has to have bunting and daffodils.