Your AI-Generated Flyers Look Terrible. Here Are 100 Prompts to Fix Them in Seconds

My daughter’s school is putting on a Halloween bake sale and the PTA sent home a flyer this week nudging parents to contribute cookies. The relevant dates and details were included. There was a cheerful Jack-o-lantern and autumnal accents. It did the job. Still, looking at it made my soul hurt. And not just because it was obviously made with AI. I’m a busy working mom too. I don’t begrudge whichever volunteer saved herself a few minutes with technology here. But if you put every other Halloween school flyer ever made in the history of the world into a blender, this would have been the result. The blandness was aggressive. I longed for handmade weirdness. Or even machine made weirdness. Please just some evidence of personality or aesthetic judgement to relieve the cheerful mediocrity. On the scale of life problems complaints, bad AI poster design ranks extremely low. But it is increasingly common. Social media is full of cranky complaints about the hideousness and repetition of everyday flyers, posters, and signs made with AI. Some businesses are even getting blowback from fed up customers. Walmart recently had to ban employees from using AI to freelance in-store graphic design. Delis have been ridiculed for menus dubbed “AI monstrosities.” Competent but uncanny AI signage is bad for our souls. But it can also be bad for business. And according to one fellow finicky design enthusiast at least it is entirely avoidable. Use good AI prompting to beat bad AI design Like me, John Hartnup has noticed a sudden repetitiveness in the everyday ads, menus, and posters surrounding him in the UK. “The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition,” he wrote on his personal site. But unlike me, Hartnup moved beyond grumbling to actually do something about this scourge of same-y same-y signs. His inspiration was to use AI tirelessness to defeat AI blandness. He asked ChatGPT to identify the design style behind so many offending posters and then to generate a long list of alternate visual styles. With the entire history of human design at its disposal, the AI cheerfully compiled. Eventually producing no less than 100 alternatives that don’t involve the usual bubbly letters in primary colors and plasticky cartoon accents. 100 options for every occasion If you find that an impressive number of styles to choose from, so do I. And they span the gamut from clean and modern to edgy and unexpected. Here’s a small sample of what ChatGPT spat back at Hartnup: Bauhaus / Modernist Geometric shapes, primary colours, strong type Feels cultural / design-led Swiss Style strict grid, lots of whitespace Black/white + one accent colour Very “information design”, almost institutional Contemporary Editorial (Magazine-style) Big headline, elegant serif + sans mix Think weekend supplement or gallery leaflet Could feel surprisingly premium Cut Paper / Collage (Matisse-inspired) Inspired by Henri Matisse cut-outs Organic shapes, bold colour blocks Very striking from a distance Botanical Scientific Illustration (Modernised) Clean line drawings of plants, labelled or diagram-like Monochrome + one highlight colour Quietly distinctive, slightly academic 90s Rave Flyer / Acid Graphics Neon colours, warped type, energetic layout Could echo the samba/dhol energy Surprisingly effective if done with restraint Japanese Minimal Poster Very restrained layout, lots of empty space One strong graphic element Elegant, calm, and unusual in this context And on and on and on. If you’re curious what these look like in practice, Hartnup applied several of them to an identical request for a summer fair flyer on his site. Now, there’s no excuse for slop signage Are the results great works of art that will one day hang in the Louvre? Absolutely not. Are they vastly more interesting and varied than the autumnal mediocrity advertising my kid’s bake sale or the grotesque menus so offending deli patrons? Absolutely yes. And best of all, they are easy to generate as standard slop signage thanks to Hartnup. He’s generously posted prompts for all 100 design styles, along with a sample poster in each style, for free to his site. Just browse, select, and pop them into your image generator of choice. There are even detailed instructions on how to get the most out of the prompts. “You don’t have to ask AI for posters as images that can’t be edited,” Hartnup reminds readers with design skills. “Claude and Gemini can generate HTML, PNG, PDF, where the text is real text, layers are real layers, you can change fonts, move things around, edit the text.” Raising the bar for business owners The whole site is an act of generosity towards all of us tormented by the tsunami of blah design AI has unleashed upon the world. It is also a challenge to business owners. If it’s this easy to use AI to make a poster that’s actually distinctive and appealing, you really shouldn’t settle for slop signage that offends your customers’ eyeballs ever again. EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN