Flyer Design

Flyers are the most-discussed practical use of AI in the shluchim groups. Every Chabad House makes them for Shabbos, Yom Tov, dinners, classes and programs, and the workflow has settled down over 2026. This page is the practical how-to. For why AI flyers look like AI and what to do about it, see AI Flyer Aesthetics. For the system prompts themselves, see Designer Prompt. A short version is the guide How do I make an event flyer with AI that doesn't look AI-generated?

The workflow most members use (October 2026)

1. Write the brief. What the event is, who it is for, the exact text, date, time and place, your brand colors, the size, and where it will be used (WhatsApp, print, email).
2. Let the Designer Prompt write the image prompt. Keep the Designer Prompt saved in a ChatGPT Project, Gemini Gem or Claude Project, paste your brief there, and it returns one detailed prompt.
3. Generate the image in ChatGPT or Gemini. Members are split on which is better, and it has flipped more than once: in January 2026 the admin preferred ChatGPT's image model for ads and edits; in July 2026 a shliach reported a "serious regression" in ChatGPT flyers and went back to Gemini. Run the same prompt in both and keep the better one. See Image Generation for the current models.
4. Make it editable. Turn the flat image into an editable design in Canva, so you can change a date or fix a word without regenerating. Or skip the image step: since October 2026 the admin's advice is to connect Canva to ChatGPT or Claude, have the AI come up with the design concept, and have it build the flyer inside Canva instead of generating a picture.
5. Proofread and check the practice. Every Hebrew letter, every date and day of the week, every time. Times come from Chabad.org for your city. Then look at the images as someone who knows the practice would (see "Getting Chabad objects right" below).
6. Export. For print, download from Canva as PDF Print, which is 300 dpi with bleed and crop marks.

Other routes that work

• Claude Design (claude.com/product/design), Anthropic's design tool, launched in April 2026 and, as of October 2026, included on every Claude plan including Free. It lays out flyers, one-pagers and slides from your own logo, fonts and photos, and exports to Canva, PDF, PPTX or HTML. Claude does not generate images itself, so bring your own photos or art. In September 2026 one member who tried it wondered "why people still use canva for anything."
• A printable HTML page. For text-heavy signs (a seating list, a schedule), ask Claude for an elegant HTML page, download it, open it in your browser, and print with "background graphics" turned on (March 2026). Text placement and Hebrew are fully under your control this way.
• A batch of flyers at once. In September 2026 a member had Claude write prompts for several flyers in one go, with the Designer Prompt attached and an instruction to "keep auditing results," then ran them all in ChatGPT's Work mode.
• Meta AI in WhatsApp. One member said in October 2026 it "is great for flyers." One report only.

Ready-made prompts

Redesign an existing flyer

Upload a flyer you already have (last year's, or one you like) and paste this. Members in April 2026 found this "far better than asking it to create from scratch," and it takes away much of the generic AI feel. In a quick group poll that month, 15 members preferred the AI redesign of a bagel-breakfast flyer and 4 preferred the original Canva version.

I've uploaded a pre-made flyer design. Redesign it with a strong visual upgrade while keeping the core content intact. Modernize the layout, improve typography, spacing, and alignment, and create a clear visual hierarchy. Refine the color palette for a more cohesive and striking look. Reduce clutter, enhance readability, and add subtle design elements where needed. Aim for a polished, professional result: more modern, distinctive, and visually impactful.

Create the redesign now.

A variation from July 2026: design something simple yourself in Canva (or open an old design), upload it, and ask the AI to refresh the design, adding "don't make new logos."

Nine styles in one go

Shared in April 2026. You get nine different directions in one image, which means nine chances to get one right. Pick the panel you like and ask for it full size.

A professional 3x3 grid composition featuring nine distinct square panels. Each panel contains an invitation to [EVENT] at [CHABAD NAME] on [DATE] at [TIME], with [KEY DETAIL], in a different artistic style. The styles are: 1. [STYLE], 2. [STYLE], 3. [STYLE], 4. [STYLE], 5. [STYLE], 6. [STYLE], 7. [STYLE], 8. [STYLE], 9. [STYLE]. Each square is clearly separated by a thin white border, high resolution.

A Yom Tov calendar flyer

A member posted a Sukkos 2026 calendar flyer prompt on 2026-09-26, built for a square WhatsApp image. Below is the same prompt with the dates turned into blanks so it works for any year and any Yom Tov with several days. Fill in the days from a Jewish calendar before you send it, and keep the instruction that the AI must take the times from Chabad.org for your city.

Create a polished square WhatsApp flyer for [CHABAD NAME] in [CITY, STATE], showing the complete [YOM TOV] holiday calendar for [YEAR].

IMPORTANT: Before creating the flyer, go to Chabad.org and look up the correct candle-lighting and Yom Tov ending times for [CITY, STATE]. Use Chabad.org as the source for all times. Do not estimate the times and do not use times from another city.

Use a sophisticated, warm Jewish holiday design: [THREE COLORS, e.g. cream background, dark forest-green typography, subtle gold accents], natural sunlight, and tasteful [YOM TOV] imagery. Keep it clean, elegant, spacious, and highly readable on a phone. No gradients, paint strokes, glowing effects, clutter, or generic AI-looking decorations.

At the top, small:
ב״ה

Large headline:
[HEADLINE, e.g. Happy Sukkos!]

Underneath:
[CHABAD NAME]

Create [NUMBER] clean calendar panels, one per day or group of days:

[DAY OF WEEK] • [DATE]
[NAME OF THE DAY]
Candle Lighting: [INSERT CHABAD.ORG LOCAL TIME]
(For a second night of Yom Tov, or Yom Tov that begins right after Shabbos, write "Candle Lighting: after [INSERT CHABAD.ORG LOCAL TIME]*")

[DAY OF WEEK] • [DATE]
[NAME OF THE DAY]
Yom Tov ends: [INSERT CHABAD.ORG LOCAL TIME]

[repeat for each day]

Use appropriate imagery for each panel:
[For Sukkos, for example:]
- A beautiful sukkah for the first days.
- Do not show a lulav or esrog on any panel that falls on Shabbos.
- Show an accurate lulav and esrog from the first weekday of Sukkos: the lulav bound with five rings of lulav leaf (the Chabad custom, no woven holder), the esrog held with the pitam up.
- Subtle sukkah imagery for Chol Hamoed.
- Aravah (willow) imagery for Hoshana Rabbah.
- Elegant Torah imagery for Shemini Atzeres and Simchas Torah.

At the bottom:
*Light candles only from a pre-existing flame.

Before generating the final flyer, double-check that every date, day of the week, and time is correct and that the times correspond specifically to [CITY, STATE] on Chabad.org.

Make all text completely legible, with no words cut off or malformed. The calendar should be the dominant element.

If a Chabad logo is uploaded, use the actual supplied logo without recreating or modifying it. Otherwise, leave clean space for the logo to be added afterward.

Check the finished image against Chabad.org yourself. Models still slip on times and weekdays even when told to look them up, and an image cannot be "fixed later" once it has gone out on WhatsApp. For the halachic details on the flyer (when to light, from what flame), go by your rav and your usual Chabad.org calendar. See also Zmanim and Hebrew dates.

Critique a finished flyer

From August 2025, still useful. Paste the flyer and this, then fix it yourself or ask for a new version:

Act like an expert graphic designer and tell me what's wrong with my design, why, and what I can do to fix it.

Garbled Hebrew

The leading image models now render short Hebrew much better than in 2025, but members were still fixing garbled letters in May 2026. What works:

• Check before you fix. Short titles and names often come out right now. Read every letter anyway.
• Remove and retype. Tell the model: "Remove the Hebrew words and change nothing else." Then type the Hebrew in Canva, where you choose the font.
• Give it the exact text as an image. Type the Hebrew yourself, export it as an image or PDF, upload it, and tell the model to use it exactly.
• Use Canva's Grab Text. It turns text inside an image into editable text boxes (in Canva: select the image, then Edit, then Tools). In May 2026 a member found it worked better on AI images than Magic Layers, which "usually ruins AI images" in that member's experience.
• Leave Hebrew out of the image entirely and add all lettering in Canva. This is the most reliable route for long or dense Hebrew.

There is a dedicated guide: How do I keep AI image tools from garbling the Hebrew on my flyers?

Getting Chabad objects right

Image models default to generic Jewish imagery, which is often wrong for a Chabad House. Check every image for these before it goes out:

• Menorah: straight diagonal branches, as in the Rambam's drawing, not rounded arms. Eight lights plus a shamash for Chanukah. In May 2026 members found ChatGPT kept getting it wrong even with a reference image, and that "straight armed Rambam Chabad menorah" worked better in Gemini.
• Luchos: square tops, not rounded.
• Shabbos candles: the mother's candles plus a smaller candle for each young girl, who lights her own. AI images usually show only two.
• Lulav and esrog: the lulav bound with five rings of lulav leaf (the Chabad custom), never a woven holder; the esrog held pitam up.
• People: kippah and tzitzis on men and boys, modest dress on women and girls, consistent across every figure.
• ב״ה at the top. A member reminded the group in August 2026 to add it to your standing instructions so it is never forgotten.

The Designer Prompt page has a Chabad-practice add-on that puts these rules into one block. When the model cannot get an object right, give it a real photo of the object and ask it to write a prompt that reproduces it (a member's tip for tefillin, August 2026).

Blue and gold, and other overused looks

In May 2026 several members begged the group to "stop using the blue and gold in flyers." It had become the default AI palette for anything Jewish. Name your own colors (with hex codes, if you have a brand kit), or ask the model to propose three palettes that fit the event and pick one. More of these tells, and the fixes, are on AI Flyer Aesthetics.

Large prints and banners

AI images often are not sharp enough for a banner or a 20x30 board. From threads in March, April and September 2026:

• Ask for high resolution and give the exact print size. One member: "Ask it for 300dpi. And maybe give it what size you want."
• Rebuild it as a Canva design (see Canva), so the text is real text and prints crisp.
• Upscale the image (Canva's upscaler, Affinity with a Canva premium plan, or a free tool like Upscayl).
• For a very large banner, a member's trick: design it at one-tenth the size with the same proportions, then scale it up. Vector art scales best.
• Export as PDF Print and ask the printer whether they want CMYK.

Real photos of real people

Image models redraw faces instead of pasting them, so a real person can come back looking slightly different.

• Draw on the photo and circle the area that must not change (May 2026).
• Give the photo early, and at the end give it again with "replace with real photo and be accurate to the detail" (April 2026).
• For collages of many faces, or removing a backpack from a group photo, use Canva (Magic Eraser) or a photo editor rather than an image generator. ChatGPT and Gemini "mess up faces" on group photos (August and September 2026).

Template and brand sources

• Shluchim Graphics, more than 2,500 flyer templates for shluchim, hundreds of them free.
• Chabad Brand, the shared Chabad logo lockup with your location, stationery and website tools. In May 2026 the admin pointed members here for official brand assets, with a warning to feed AI tools only clean, correct brand files.
• ZmanimGraphics, shared by a member in February 2026 for candle-lighting graphics sent before Shabbos and Yom Tov.

What changed in 2026

• February: the Designer Prompt was first posted and became the most-shared asset in the groups.
• March: Canva's Magic Layers made flat AI images editable.
• April: ChatGPT's new image model (Images 2.0) arrived; the "redesign an existing flyer" technique took off; Claude Design launched.
• May: blue-and-gold fatigue; the menorah and Luchos problem came back up.
• July: complaints that every flyer looked like "one of four AI designs."
• September: ChatGPT Images 2.5; Canva connectors in ChatGPT and Claude became the standard way to get an editable file.

Related

• AI Flyer Aesthetics, the theory and the debate.
• Designer Prompt, the system prompts.
• Canva, Nano Banana, ChatGPT.
• Image Generation, the current image models.
• Prompting AI Image Tools to Depict Your Community.
• ChabadOne Integration, where the event page eventually lives.