In Defense of Terrible (Human) Design

 I found this flyer on a public trash can while walking the dog:

Great Christ. What a fugly design. How is this bad design, you ask? Where to even start? People like bullet points, so let's do bullets:

• The illegible handwriting font, rendered MORE illegible by stretching it horizontally and turning it into outlines

• The illegible serif font, treated the same way and turned RED on BLUE, for great visual vibrations

• The weird stock photos in circles of different sizes with unrelated captions on the outside

• Zero visual hierarchy. After "King's Kyds Academy", my eye doesn't know where to go next, besides wanting to look away altogether

• Open Enrollement! (sic) on the Nickelodeon splat shape, except it's green, so now it looks like vomit

My only guess is they got some of the toddlers to design and lay out this flyer. Those kids don't know shit.

But STILL, this hideous flyer shows some faulty but human decision making. A person saw the dimensions of the flyer and figured, "Hmmm. My design is shorter than the final dimensions... Hey, I'll just STRETCH the entire thing to fill up that space!" They couldn't decide which colors to use, so they just went with all the available ones to make it fun and kid-like. They typeset the phone number in the weird handwritten font, but it didn't look like a phone number anymore, so they added a phone icon to it!

Those naive or incompetent design decisions still took some thought. And the layout involved real effort on a computer somewhere. That sure beats the hell out of typing in a prompt on ChatGPT and having it shit out a soul-less, cramped flyer that looks like every other AI flyer out there now.

So where would you rather send your kids to be watched— a place that puts in some human effort, or a place that does the bare minimum and expects you to accept their lazy AI turd of a flyer? I'm going with the humans.