Ant Davis Tools

POSTERPROMPT

Most AI posters look the same because the prompt asks for a vibe instead of a design. Here's the same brief, run twice.

Same brief, two prompts

The difference is entirely in the prompt

Both of these were made for the same thing: a poster recognising someone on the team who spotted and reported a phishing email. One came from a vague, adjective-led request. The other from a prompt with a named style, a locked palette, three weighted facts, and a list of clichés ruled out. Same subject, same intent, same model.

Generic AI-generated shoutout poster featuring a cartoon dog mascot in sunglasses, confetti and glow effects
Before No style named, no palette capped, no clichés ruled out. The model reaches for a mascot and a pile of stars and confetti to carry the enthusiasm instead of the design.
See the prompt 
Make a fun poster celebrating someone who reported a phishing email. Make it feel like a shoutout.
Xerox punk style recognition poster reading The Finance Team in burnt orange and damson on an off white background
After A named style, a capped palette with the background explicitly set, three weighted lines, and a hook-and-envelope illustration doing the conceptual work instead of a mascot.
See the prompt 
Design a square, 1:1 ratio, for social poster.
Style: DIY xerox/photocopy punk flyer aesthetic: high contrast, visible photocopier degradation and toner noise, cut-and-paste collage logic, deliberately rough alignment, no smooth gradients or clean vector polish.
Palette: use only these colours, nothing else: Off white (#F4EEDD) as the dominant background, Burnt orange (#D9822B) and Damson (#7A1F3D) as accents.
Copy: the only text on the poster is "The Finance Team" as the headline, "Spotted and reported a live phishing attempt" as the what-they-did line, "That's exactly what keeps us safe" as the thank you line. Nothing else.
Composition: strong hierarchy, deliberate negative space, no clutter.
Do not include: bevel effects, chalk texture, stock photos, starburst shapes, gradients, glow effects.
Finish: crisp and intentional, like it was designed by a working graphic designer for this specific brief, not generated from a generic template.

Now build your own

Answer a few questions, get a prompt like the ones above

Same logic every time: a real style, a locked palette, three weighted facts, a list of clichés ruled out. Written for you, not left to a mood.

1

What's this poster for?

This decides the facts you'll fill in and how the palette names read further down. Worth settling first.

A security callout and an event poster are driven by completely different information. Forcing both into "what, when, where" is why a lot of awareness content ends up reading like an invite rather than an instruction.

Screens can fake glow and backlit colour. Ink can't. This just tells the model which one it's actually rendering for, so it doesn't describe an effect that won't survive being printed.

2

Pick a real design lineage

Not a mood. An actual visual tradition the model can imitate properly.

A vague word like "cool" or "fun" gets averaged into whatever the model has seen most, which is almost always the same chalk-texture, drop-shadow default. A named lineage gives it a real, coherent tradition to imitate instead of a mood to guess at.

EVENT

Swiss / International

Grid, one accent, Helvetica logic
EVENT EVENT

Risograph

Flat inks, visible misregistration
EVENT

Brutalist type-only

No imagery, type is the image
Event

Vintage travel poster

Flat colour blocks, mid-century
EVENT

Xerox / photocopy punk

High contrast, torn, DIY
Event

Editorial / newspaper

Hairline rules, dense columns
3

Lock the palette

Pick one combination, or set your own. Either way, capped at three.

"Vibrant colours" invites the model to grab from its whole palette at once, which is how you end up with a rainbow gradient. Capping it to one named pair or trio, and giving that pair a name, is what makes it read as chosen rather than default.

Your own colours

Enter a hex code and PosterPrompt will suggest colours that are known to sit well against it. Or ignore the suggestions and enter your own second and third colours, brand colours work fine here.

Colour 1
Colour 2 (optional)
Colour 3 (optional)
4

The facts that must appear

Fill in the three lines for the poster type you picked above.

Every extra line of copy competes for the same visual weight as the ones before it. Three facts is enough for almost anything. A fourth is possible, but it always costs some of the hierarchy the first three had.

Every extra line competes for the same visual weight. Adding this will push something else down the hierarchy.

5

Ban the clichés

Checked items are excluded from the prompt. Untick anything you actually want.

These are the defaults a model reaches for when a prompt doesn't say otherwise: drop shadow, bevel, a stock photo of someone mid-jump. Naming them explicitly as things to avoid is often more effective than any amount of positive description.

6

Format and anything else

ChatGPT and DALLE read best from a written brief. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion read better as a comma-separated list of tags with their own negative-prompt syntax. Same choices, different shape.

Fill in style, poster type, palette and the three facts first.
Check it before you use it. This prompt is generated, not guaranteed clean. Read it back before pasting it anywhere: make sure nothing's contradicting itself, the facts are spelled correctly, and it actually says what you want it to say. That goes for any prompt any website hands you, not just this one.