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Comment by ereiamjh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

That's a really backwards explanation for styles that executives commissioned, funded, and popularized in the first place

I think it's in fact forward thinking, in that modern executives lost the taste their older elites had. Or at least they fired the tastemakers for those who pleased them personally, to the sacrifice of proper design. Probably a bit of both, along with other factors.

The more charitable perspective (that falls more important point #2) is simply that taste is different now among the modern billionaire. Someone who can wander onto a stage in a turtleneck and denim jeans simply won't be the type of person who wants a "loud and bold" car. But they might still want to say that they had Ferrari make it. Jony Ive's perspective on design may simply be the product of the people and environments he surrounded himself with.

I can't remember where, but there was an article about the luxury homes billionaires are building themselves. They tent to have he design aesthetic of a bland, but expensive, corporate hotel.

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.

>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.

I believe that was ultimately what my response wanted to emphasize, and partially the call to action of the video. There is great design out there, but you need to wander through oceans of slop to find it. I had no clue about "Superblocks" until that video.

Likewise, to link the ideas back to Herr; AI is creating an ocean of slop that will make it nearly impossible to find the truly innovative used of AI out there. Curation was already a hard problem pre-AI and this only increases such difficulty by magnitudes. Among reducing said slop (which is nearly impossible now), the call to action is to have proper tastemakers lead the charge and bring out good ideas. Not just ones that generate the most money. Curation by definition almost always lowers view traffic to increase customer satisfaction, and that's not something our ad-based datascape wants.

De-tracked link: https://youtu.be/HgjXjPP_p3s

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

God no. This has pretty much all of the slop elements save for jizz drops. Paint brush strokes, icon -> caption -> text, ai divisors... pretty much zero effort, compared to OP's posters.

Well, you're right that it informs me whether I want to attend or not...

I like this, looks good.

I wasn't aware of it until AI came around, but apparently there's a cult around how much effort you put into your event posters. Didn't know advertising was something people felt folks should be putting tons of effort into.

The OP article is surprisingly candid about their critique - not that the AI-generated style they've identified is bad, but that it is so common. Therein apparently lies one frailty of our human condition - if everyone can do it, it becomes out of fashion at best, or even stigmatized at worse. I feel there's a place where that's a rational instinct, but under an extensive backdrop where the instinct is irrational - aka, 'art'. If someone needed an explanation for 'why can't we have nice things', I think OP's article articulates it very well.

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.

Tombola: ahead of the event you ask for donations of prizes. We do it for a PTA, so it's a "no school uniform if you bring a Tombola prize" thing. Sweets, booze, trinkets, etc.

Then you get two matching sets of raffle tickets. You put all of one set folded up in a drum. You take perhaps the ones ending in 0 or 5 from the other set, and tape them to prizes.

Then you sell 5 draws for £1, if you draw 5 or 0 you win the corresponding prize.

Very popular, big money spinner, legal without tedious admin.

A common meme is that a lot of the prizes get regifted time and time again, especially unwanted weird booze - the strawberry liqueur someone aunt brought home from Spain.

Those posters all look pretty damn good to me. Thanks for that page. Super helpful for me and I need that right now.

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.

> To get a really clean design, you need to edit it down to the essentials.

I recently needed an "avatar" for the wall at work. The actual one I went with was a Tatakovsky-inspired minimalist avatar that was settled by the 4th prompt.

But I kept exploring and in the process had developed a canonical identity model definition which could then be transformed according to various art movements and other ideas, by the end focusing more on the light and materials than specific artists.

Some of my favourites and surprising ones out of the hundreds of images were:

- Prairie School with my portrait expressed as faceted timber

- Czech Cubism where my face was merged with the architecture

- Japanese sumi-e and ukiyo-e prints

- Delaunay triangulation

- Turing morphogenesis

- Magnetic fields

- Gaudi-inspired organic sculpture

Well, all the HN chat put me in the mood, so I did V2.

There is a lot more empty space, and lot less clutter, and a lot less over-literal interpretation of event details (just because a gig is at a venue called The Anchor, doesn't mean the poster needs a picture of an anchor)

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.

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.

youve got to get rid of the list with the icons as bullets. vertical or 3-4 of them horizontally is a dead giveaway.

your posters also dont suffer it, but most of the ones in the wild have 3-7 extra catchphrases or taglines thrown all over the poster. same but different. this but that. not this that. chatgpt just really likes to add phases and annotations all over posters.

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?

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.

Would someone who's "trying to get started in design" be able to make anything as good as these AI posters? And how would they survive in a world where machines can do their job for free?

I suppose human artists will continue to exist, but they will be like chess players: they will continue to exist simply because they love art, but they won't be able to compete with AI.

ETA: less than 2 years.

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.

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