A lot of people in the comments say that the supposedly better examples in the article are still “horrible” because they can tell they’re AI and point to things that the AI did “wrong” and a human artist would do better.
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
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.
This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for <a href="https://john.hartnup.uk/poster-prompts/" rel="nofollow">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.
There is very often a certain softness to the fonts in generated images. Why is that and is there a name for it?
Thinking more, I thinking the softness is actually inconsistency. Because the letters are generated, no two letters will be exact same and if zoomed in some edge might not even be perfectly straight. Another thing we can do these days (I think author should really try out in V2) is to use code to generate. You may have seen examples of generating Javascript based videos with Claude. Same can be done with posters. Generate a font sheet and use that in code generated poster with image generated background.
I'm fascinating by how image models draw text.
I've a designer friend who's very distracted by the text on even a text-only gpt-image generated poster, because it looks like a font he knows, but differs in subtle ways.
I'm thinking, good, it's escaping from the tyranny of fonts. A font is limited by what a font layout engine can do. A human drawing letter shapes can decide that one 'f' ought to look different from another 'f' in the same layout, if that works for them. And so can AI.
This clearly works in styles like "60s psychedelic" where it's all swirly "hand drawn" letters. But I see no reason why it shouldn't work for "type". Perhaps bulk text would be more readable if the engine had that kind of freedom? If only we knew how?
The current generation of image generating AI probably isn't doing as good a job as it possibly could right now, but with the right training, all sorts of things are possible.
ajjenkins · · focus · HN ↗
That may be true if you’re working with a top of the line artist, but in my experience the average freelance designer online is significantly worse than AI. I’ve worked with dozens of budget friendly designers on Fiverr and consistently get way worse results than I’ve gotten from AI models. Will a great human designer produce better output than an AI? Maybe, but a small local event or business probably won’t have the budget to hire them or know where to find them. It’s cheaper, faster and easier to use AI to generate something that’s good enough for their purposes.
People also point out all the little flaws in the “good” examples and cite them as obvious tells that they were AI generated. I think it would be interesting to see if people could reliably distinguish between AI generated flyers and human made flyers. Sure, sometimes it’s obvious like when the AI adds those weird, cartoony people. But if the model is told not to create designs like that and stick to the styles used in the second half of the article, I expect people would have a much harder time distinguishing the human designs from the AI designs.
eloisant · · focus · HN ↗
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.
ereiamjh · · focus · HN ↗
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.
smusamashah · · focus · HN ↗
Thinking more, I thinking the softness is actually inconsistency. Because the letters are generated, no two letters will be exact same and if zoomed in some edge might not even be perfectly straight. Another thing we can do these days (I think author should really try out in V2) is to use code to generate. You may have seen examples of generating Javascript based videos with Claude. Same can be done with posters. Generate a font sheet and use that in code generated poster with image generated background.
ereiamjh · · focus · HN ↗
I've a designer friend who's very distracted by the text on even a text-only gpt-image generated poster, because it looks like a font he knows, but differs in subtle ways.
I'm thinking, good, it's escaping from the tyranny of fonts. A font is limited by what a font layout engine can do. A human drawing letter shapes can decide that one 'f' ought to look different from another 'f' in the same layout, if that works for them. And so can AI.
This clearly works in styles like "60s psychedelic" where it's all swirly "hand drawn" letters. But I see no reason why it shouldn't work for "type". Perhaps bulk text would be more readable if the engine had that kind of freedom? If only we knew how?
The current generation of image generating AI probably isn't doing as good a job as it possibly could right now, but with the right training, all sorts of things are possible.