Flyer Design

The single most-discussed practical use case in the chat. Every shliach makes flyers, for Shabbos, Yomim Tovim, dinners, and programs, and the chat has steadily codified a workable AI workflow.

Why it's hard

See AI Flyer Aesthetics for the 7 AI Tells. The short version: AI image models center everything, polish everything, blend styles, and fake the type space. They used to garble Hebrew too, though the top models mostly handle short Hebrew as of mid-2026 (see the note below). And they can't see what they just generated, so each edit drifts.

The current best-practice workflow

Synthesized from many threads (about 30 chat messages):

1. Brief in natural language. What is this for, who is the audience, what mood, what text exactly, what brand colors, what size.
2. Have one model write the prompt for another. Ask ChatGPT to turn the brief into a detailed image-gen prompt that names a single design tradition (Swiss typographic, grassroots broadside, editorial magazine, luxury invitation, etc.). Optionally use the system prompt in Designer Prompt.
3. Generate in Nano Banana / Google AI Studio. Highest visual quality, best at not garbling text on the first pass. (GPT Image 2, ChatGPT's built-in image generation, now co-leads and is a strong alternative here.)
4. Strip the Hebrew before editing. Tell the model: remove the Hebrew letters, leave placeholders, change nothing else.
5. Open in Canva with Magic Layers. Magic Layers decomposes the flat AI image into editable elements, so you can fix text, swap typography, and adjust spacing.
6. Type the Hebrew yourself in Canva (or Affinity), where you control the font.
7. Optional: vision-check. Upload the result back to ChatGPT and ask it to identify the remaining AI tells.

Update (mid-2026): steps 4 to 6 are now optional polish, not a rescue from garbled letters. Through 2025 every image model mangled Hebrew, so you always stripped it and retyped in Canva. As of mid-2026 GPT Image 2 and Nano Banana Pro both render short Hebrew (a title, a date, a name) correctly and right-to-left, so verify the output first and only retype when the Hebrew is wrong or when you need exact typographic control. Canva still wins for long or dense Hebrew, where accuracy slips.

The "Designer prompt" pattern

The single most-cited prompt asset in the chat; see Designer Prompt. It frames the LLM as a "senior graphic designer with 15+ years designing real print and digital campaigns" who outputs one copy-paste-ready prompt for an image generator, refusing to drift into AI defaults.

Easier-than-Photoshop workflows

Workflow	What it's good for
ChatGPT brief → Nano Banana → Canva text	Default. Most flyers.
ChatGPT brief → ChatGPT image (GPT Image 2) → Canva polish	When you want one tool.
Grok batch generation → hand-pick → Canva	For generating many variations quickly, then hand-picking.
Upload an existing flyer → "Redesign it with a strong visual upgrade while keeping the core content" → Nano Banana	For modernizing tired templates.
Upload reference images, brand colors, and sample event flyers	The Custom GPT / Gem path for repeated brand consistency.

Describing your community accurately

To get community-accurate imagery, describe attire, action, and scene rather than identity labels. Concrete visual description tells the model exactly what to render:

"Women wearing modern modest dresses, hair visible, celebrating at a Shabbat dinner table."

Phrases like modern modest dresses, hair visible, no head coverings, smart casual, Chabad-style, Chasidic render community-accurate images more reliably than identity labels. See Prompting AI Image Tools to Depict Your Community for the fuller discussion.

Chabad-specific iconography that still fails

• Menorah arm count. Both 7-arm (Beis HaMikdash) and 9-arm (Chanukah) come back consistently wrong.
• Luchos shape. Tablets come back curved-top instead of square.
• Kippah / long-sleeve consistency. Get one figure right and the others drift.
• Hebrew text. See above.

There is an in-progress "Chabad image skill" custom Gem mentioned in the chat, but no public system prompt yet.

Reference image / template sources

• shluchim.koshergraphics.com, a flyer template library
• shlichusmarket.com, paid templates
• chabadbrand.com, brand guideline assets
• Squarespace plus ChabadBrand templates for full-site projects (examples: chabadfortwayne.com, jewishchagrinfalls.com)

Related

• AI Flyer Aesthetics, the full theory.
• Designer Prompt, the prompt itself.
• Nano Banana
• Canva
• ChatGPT
• ChabadOne Integration, where the flyer eventually gets deployed.