AI can make a poster. But can it do your marketing?

A flash here, an icon there, headlines competing for attention and enough information to make you feel faint. Then, the star of the show, a beautifully rendered AI generated floating croissant!

Some are questionable. Some are surprisingly good. And some probably do exactly what they're supposed to.

Which raises an interesting question. If AI can produce marketing materials in seconds, where does that leave the value of professional design and creative thinking?

We might question the typography, the layout or the bizarre choice of floating pastry, but the average person might glance at the poster for half a second, decide they're not interested and carry on walking. Or they might spot the breakfast offer and turn up on Sunday. Yum.

So perhaps the poster is doing its job. And perhaps we’re getting so caught up in how it was made that we’re missing a bigger conversation.

Before we start shouting at the robots

AI is an extraordinary tool. It can help us explore ideas, generate imagery, test creative directions and speed up production and processes, and it will only get better.

My creative process still starts with a pencil. Not a prompt or an AI-generated mood board. A pencil, usually a clicky pencil, but if I can’t find it, any old pencil will do. But not a biro. Definitely not a biro.

When I start thinking creatively, I need to scribble, cross things out and draw things that look absolutely nothing like what I'm trying to create. Random notes, shapes, letters and ideas. It's all part of the process.

Those early, scribbly moments aren’t wasted time. They’re where I start working out what the idea actually is, what it needs to communicate to the audience and how it might come to life.

Then AI can help me develop an idea. It can challenge my thinking, present me with references to explore, and sharpen and speed up my process. But I never want to skip the thinking.

For me, the pencil is my prompt.

Looking good isn't the same as working well 

Years of working in design have taught me that making something look good is only part of the job. There’s a science to this stuff - visual hierarchy, contrast, typography and composition all influence how we navigate a message on a page. When too many things compete for our attention, it becomes harder to identify what’s important. If everything is shouting, nobody knows where to look.

And it’s not just the robots. Plenty of human designed posters have been crimes against typography since long before Claude and ChatGPT arrived. AI didn’t invent bad design. We’ve been managing that perfectly well ourselves for decades.

But here's the thing. Just because something doesn't meet a designer's standards doesn't mean it isn't doing its job. If the audience understands the message, likes the offer and takes action, does it really matter who or what created it?

The real question isn't whether AI can produce something that looks good. It's whether it can produce something that works, and whether the person using it knows how to tell the difference.

A logo isn't a brand. A poster isn't a campaign.

Design and creative marketing have never just been about making an image or a poster. It’s about the strategy, experience and thinking behind the creative.

Who are you trying to reach? What do you know about them? Why should they choose you over the place down the road? What do you want them to think, feel or do? And how does this fit into your wider brand and marketing strategy?

Those questions come before any pencil hits paper or any prompt is written. The decisions come before the artwork. Because a prompt can produce a visual, but it doesn't automatically mean you've asked the right question in the first place. And if you don't know what you're trying to achieve, how can you judge whether the result is any good? You might end up with a floating croissant!

Take an AI-generated logo, for example. You've created something you love, it looks great on screen and you're ready to use it. Brilliant. But what happens next?

Does it work in a tiny social media profile picture? Does it scale up on signage? Does it work in black and white? What about a reversed version on a dark background? Do you need a logo mark, a horizontal version, a stacked version or a transparent background? What is a vector file? What are the brand colours and fonts? How should the identity show up across your website, social media, advertising and presentations?

A good designer considers all of these things. And a client shouldn't have to know every technical detail to commission good work. That's part of the expertise they're paying for.

None of this means AI doesn't have a place in the creative process. Quite the opposite. Used well, it can help businesses and creative teams explore ideas, work more efficiently and open up possibilities that weren't there before. But the technology is only as useful as the thinking that guides it.

Maybe we'll look back and laugh

Who knows? Maybe today’s AI posters will become a wonderfully weird little chapter in creative history. The design equivalent of the shellsuit. Loud, a bit much, absolutely everywhere and, at the time, someone in Liverpool thought they looked amazing!

AI will get better. The industry will change. The creative opportunities will keep evolving.

The point isn’t to resist change. It’s to know what you’re doing with it.