Will AI Design Tools take over?
All the talk at the moment is how AI is going to change the world but will AI design tools be up to our high standards?
At Discount Displays our team of graphic designers have many years of experience designing banners, signs and posters for events all over the world. Will graphic designers be replaced by AI or will there be some sort of hybrid solution? We started to have a look at what AI can do in terms of designing posters for charities.
The results were mixed. We tried Chat GPT, Canva and Adobe Firefly all using the same brief. With these AI tools you can keep going back and write new prompts to slightly alter the design or ask them to completely start from scratch.
The Prompt
“Create a vibrant and engaging A1-sized poster for a Fancy Dress Fundraising Event happening on 12 September 2024”
Canva Results
Using Canva’s magic media which is still under development and a similar brief these are the results.
Designs created by Canva from text prompt
Canva comes up with basic template background designs and it is then up to you to add the text you want but it has very powerful text editing tools. It’s quick and easy but requires your input. You need to click to customise this template and you need a bit of an idea about font styles and sizes. If you need more advice on the best fonts for signs check out our previous blog.
Text added to the basic design template Canva first created
Adobe Firefly Results
Next we tried Adobe Firefly and asked it to create a poster using the same brief. Unfortunately, it couldn’t create a full poster design including words just yet.
Adobe firefly design
Adobe Firefly couldn’t cope with text but themes are fun and you could use them to create a background. Then you could need to create something like this using a pre-designed Canva template.
Adobe Firefly to create the background and a template created by Canva
Chat GPT Results
Lastly, we tried Chat GPT using our own tool “charity poster assistant“. As you can see at best it gives you a design idea but currently it is very poor at creating text even when it’s given a designated brief. 
Chat GPT – Charity poster assistant design
Like Adobe Firefly you can just get chat GPT to create the background image and then upload that to Canva to add text.
Chat GPT designed background
Overall AI Design Tool results
Overall the AI tools we tested here to create a poster were fun and came up with some fresh ideas but we were not able to produce a polished finished result from a simple text prompt. These AI design tools are learning all the time so what they can do in the coming months could be much more impressive so we will revisit them soon.
