Comment by ereiamjh
19 hours ago
This is very true and after rendering 100 prompts twice for 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.
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.
Designers having that artistic taste, and clients lacking it, is exactly why I don't think generative AI is going to do much to replace (skilled) designers anytime soon. Likewise for other creative professions, and indeed for knowledge work in general.
Taste is a great solution for abundance, so I agree. Also, there's definitely a rubberband effect where products & designs need to differentiate on their design to stand out in a homogenous world, and you truly do need creative professionals having that judgment. Even using AI as a tool, you have to have the sayable vocabulary (at the very least) to agitate the aesthetic status quo.
And low-skill graphic design had already been mostly replaced by Canva, so I don't think AI is really having as much impact on the design industry as people might suppose.
Knowing what is in the realm of possibility can help you get much more out of genAI.
For example, you have to know about a style to know to ask for it or some variation on it.
I think we ALREADY at the point when AI is capable to replace like 99.7% of designers. It is only a question of market inertia and personal brands that prevent it from happening right now.
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.
>It mostly doesn’t matter because there’s no economic incentive for it to matter
Very generous way to say "executive greed has drained bespoke design out of society. I've been seeing more videos on such a topic, but this one was by far the best one I've seen yet: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s?is=yVsto8SCnY-SsnVY
(Just in case, don't let the thumbnail fool you. The car simply frames as it expands to general society).
I tried to give this video a good-faith watch, but found myself disagreeing with much of the evidence, conclusions, and research. It seems to be trying to diagnosing cleanslop — the minimalist and flat trend, which renders poorly as being clinical and lifeless. My point was that economics drive aesthetic, and in that framing, I think we both agree corporations will deliver the least amount of design tolerable.
Design-differentiated products still exist (Apple as mentioned, IKEA, Nike, Linear to name a few), but they're outnumbered in the current landscape and arguably still greedy.
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That's a really backwards explanation for styles that executives commissioned, funded, and popularized in the first place
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De-tracked link: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s
As one of the AI-wielding amateurs, I got positive feedback from an audience member on this Ai-gen poster for a talk I gave earlier this summer https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MaawQcupC5XHqWBiTujSpKOKohx...
The clutter is there yes - it's not a sparse 1970s kitsch cultural event promo or 1970s sci-fi book cover (random example I found in 2 minutes https://www.etsy.com/listing/715136429/david-bowie-moonage-d... ) that's for sure - but I wouldn't want to remove any of mine's elements as each one informs the viewer at a glance their decision whether to attend or not.
Just taking one of your prompts and adding
> N.B. Make sure all the important information pops out (is visible at first glance) like an expert designer would, the information is more important than the design.
Already have me a much better result with the 'Arts & Crafts style', but N=1 so YMMV
I’ve been working on a thing where a bunch of raw content goes through a summarization pipeline and then gets manipulated with a bunch of checks to clean up copy and reduce clutter.
And then the visuals get added with a set of fixed templates. It’s not fully there but is reducing a LOT of the clutter.
Some of the results are even what I’d call good (and I’m a designer). I think a good harness could make non-cluttered results, if one of the AI labs was interested in a “less is more” approach.
Those posters all look pretty damn good to me. Thanks for that page. Super helpful for me and I need that right now.
Are these "fayre" events some kind of UK thing? I also didn't know offhand what "tombola" is and it comes across like it's part of a collection of standard activities for a "fayre" that have no cultural significance to me.
(Canadian here. Not everything is shared across the Commonwealth, I guess.)
Yes, fayres are popular in the UK especially in schools and small villages. A Tombola is a type of raffle where people buy tickets and the winning numbers are picked from a rotating drum. Normally done to raise small amounts of money for local causes.
Say you want to add an artist or change some information. Regeneration will end up with another poster altogether, right?
A new image at a technical level, but all modern autoregressive image models are skilled at only changing what is absolutely necessary if asked to make edits.
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 the . 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.
Well, low-stakes clients are usually poor clients because they’re clueless and overly demanding.
Real designers would avoid them in the first place.
And that’s why they want to use AI.
Tangent I guess, it would be interesting to have like a AI/not AI quiz. They still look AI to me but idk if it's because I know
It should be clear in the text, disguising as non-AI is not a goal. It's allowed to look like AI. It's just trying not to look shit.
And that default look - that might not be shit either. Except we've now seen it repeated so many times that we're sick of it.
Am I biased to thinking it looks like shit because I know it's ai though and I think the AI look is overdone?
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Suppose you have a budget of $20.
Do you think you will find good artists working for that fee?
I don't think so, unless they are working to prove a point -- that humans can be as good as AI.
And that's the problem:
Humans can be as good as AI, but they are much more expensive.
Maybe you have a friend that's trying to get started in design and could do a favor for a chance to build a portfolio.
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