Welcome to a new Cross-Product Creative Challenge! Thanks to everyone who participated in the temporal mash-up. This time, we're messing with history again, this time with a civic or propaganda poster from an impossible timeline. The Challenge: Design a civic poster—propaganda, safety warnings, or recruitment ads—for a world that runs by different rules. Maybe it's a world where air is a subscription service, or where silence is the local currency. Maybe it's “Join the Venus Terraforming Corps – 1939” “Steam Rail to the Moon – Great Western Aether Lines” “Vote for the AI Party – 1968” Go crazy. Start in Firefly or Boards or Express or Photoshop, but use at least two different tools to get to your final product. Guidelines: A prompt is not enough. Layer your assets and refine your composition. Treat Firefly as a collaborator, not a shortcut. Use prompts to generate characters. Try out partner models. Think like a director. What’s the story here? Who are the characters? What's happening in the scene? It’s a Cross-Product Challenge! Don't do it all in Firefly. Use Photoshop, Illustrator, Substance, Adobe Express, Fresco—whatever tools will help you build the scene. Share your process. Tell us how you created it. What tools did you use? How did you refine your idea? What choices did you make? My example is a PSA from the U.S. government Department of Gravity.Poster-1a.jpg The base is a typical 1950s American family scene generated with Nano Banana. The tie-downs and safety harnesses are Generative Fill using Firefly 3, adjusted and composited in Photoshop. The departmental logo was generated in Adobe Illustrator using the Gemini partner model. Because this is a thinly veiled threat, I generated a hapless golfer who didn't pay his license fee. Text added in Photoshop.

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Question

Cross-Product Creative Challenge #11: PSA Posters from an Alternate Timeline

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
January 16, 2026
17 replies
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Welcome to a new Cross-Product Creative Challenge! Thanks to everyone who participated in the temporal mash-up. This time, we're messing with history again, this time with a civic or propaganda poster from an impossible timeline.

The Challenge:

Design a civic poster—propaganda, safety warnings, or recruitment ads—for a world that runs by different rules. Maybe it's a world where air is a subscription service, or where silence is the local currency. Maybe it's

“Join the Venus Terraforming Corps – 1939”
“Steam Rail to the Moon – Great Western Aether Lines”
“Vote for the AI Party – 1968”

Go crazy. Start in Firefly or Boards or Express or Photoshop, but use at least two different tools to get to your final product.

Guidelines:

A prompt is not enough. Layer your assets and refine your composition. Treat Firefly as a collaborator, not a shortcut. Use prompts to generate characters. Try out partner models.
Think like a director. What’s the story here? Who are the characters? What's happening in the scene?
It’s a Cross-Product Challenge! Don't do it all in Firefly. Use Photoshop, Illustrator, Substance, Adobe Express, Fresco—whatever tools will help you build the scene.
Share your process. Tell us how you created it. What tools did you use? How did you refine your idea? What choices did you make?

My example is a PSA from the U.S. government Department of Gravity.
Poster-1a.jpg

The base is a typical 1950s American family scene generated with Nano Banana. The tie-downs and safety harnesses are Generative Fill using Firefly 3, adjusted and composited in Photoshop. The departmental logo was generated in Adobe Illustrator using the Gemini partner model. Because this is a thinly veiled threat, I generated a hapless golfer who didn't pay his license fee. Text added in Photoshop.

GeekyGirlRex7295714

Community Expert

pawfect.png

Started in Firefly and ended in Ps, with a little hijinks along the way.

Writer | Developer | Facilitator | Geek!

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

Our cat has his lookout spots, so this is right up his alley. I love your sense of humor!

@mj

Community Expert

I didn't expect this as the final result, but this is what came out the other end of the wormhole @AlanGilbertson.

Started off with an image selection in FF, then zooted off to Xp, hooked up a poster over there, then over to my fave, Ps, tons of grunge and blending modes. Yum.

mj_0-1769450824280.png

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

That's delicious, Mo! I could 100 percent see that pasted onto a wall in a dystopian society where a would-be dictator was wreaking havoc. Oh, Wait...

JCamp2011

Participant

Here is my Chemistry teacher punny versionJan challenge.png

Jessica L. R. Campos

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

Love that idea! What was your process (review the guidelines)?

M

Miroslava387287258kb0

Participating Frequently

CoffeeShop.png

First I went to Adobe Firefly and put the prompt "a coffee shop with astronauts in the moon".

Then I went to Photoshop and used the Generative Fill option with Gemini 3 Nano Banana Pro. I put the prompt little fuzzy aliens and added more words depending on where the fuzzy aliens are placed.

See if you can spot all the fuzzy aliens in the photo!

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

Thanks, Miroslav, that's really nicely done, but it would be more at home in Challenge #10 than in this one. Read over the guidelines again and let's see how you'd approach that one!

S

Shira Moskovitz

Participating Frequently

Screenshot 2026-01-21 165847.png

In this reality, the "Great Handover" wasn't a war, it was a retirement party. After the volatility of the 60s, the government began a campaign encouraging citizens to trade their voting rights for a life of state-sponsored leisure. This poster is the face of that "gentle" persuasion: reassuring, clinical, and final.

Phase 1: The Core Vision (Firefly): I used the prompt below to generate the central "Passing the Torch" moment. I specifically looked for a composition that balanced the warmth of a human hand with the cold, undeniable precision of the machine.
Phase 2: Composition & Layout (Photoshop): I brought the base image into Photoshop to crop and frame the scene, ensuring the focus stayed on the exchange of the voter token. I cleaned up the lighting to make the robot's hand feel more "advanced" and inevitable.
Phase 3: Typography & Final Design (Adobe Express): I moved the project into Adobe Express to layer the text. I chose a bold, clean font to emphasize the word "PRECISE," leaning into the idea that machines offer a mathematical perfection that humans simply can’t match.

The Tools: Firefly, Photoshop, and Adobe Express.

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

I could see this as part of the background in a scene from a dystopian SciFi movie (Ridley Scott, or maybe Guillermo del Toro directing).

F

fldavis07

Participant

Firefly_Gemini Flash_Design a civic poster—propaganda, safety warnings, or recruitment ads—for a world tha 694182.png

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

That's a good start, @fldavis07. Now follow the guidelines for the challenge: Bring it into Express or Photoshop, fix the typography, maybe adjust things a bit, and repost. Tell us your creative process.

sima.

Community Expert

Poster .png

For this poster project, I began by exploring a dystopian world centered on a creative caste system—a society where creativity itself has become a source of power.

To develop this world, I first used ChatGPT as a thinking partner to generate and refine ideas about a future in which people who merely know how to use AI are positioned as a labor class, while those who can approach problems with uniquely human creativity—conceptual thinking, abstraction, and original imagination—form the ruling class. Through multiple rounds of dialogue, I clarified the social hierarchy, values, and tensions of this imagined society.

Based on this refined concept, I made a key creative decision:

AI-only proficiency represents labor, while human-driven creative authorship represents authority.

I then revised the concept to make this contrast visually explicit.

Next, I moved into image generation using Adobe Firefly. I wrote and iterated on prompts to reflect this hierarchy, generating a wide range of visual outcomes. These iterations helped me explore composition, symbolism, and mood—especially the contrast between control and extraction, elevation and exploitation.

After selecting the strongest visual directions, I brought the images into Photoshop for further refinement. There, I adjusted color grading to reinforce the dystopian tone, modified typography to feel more institutional and authoritative, and carefully refined facial expressions to emphasize emotional distance, control, and hierarchy.

Beyond these steps, the final result is the product of many additional iterations—revisiting prompts, rebalancing visuals, making subtle compositional adjustments, and repeatedly questioning whether the image truly communicated the underlying power structure of this world.

This process—moving back and forth between concept, AI generation, and human judgment—ultimately led to the final poster, which reflects not just the use of AI tools, but a deliberate, human-centered creative direction layered on top of them.

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

Excellent collaborative work, @sima. Looks like you collaborated with ChatGPT on the project description, too. Do you find LLMs tend to "talk" like art critics or art historians, and tend to overthink and over-analyse? That's something I've noticed when working with Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity on anything creative.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Tribute to George Orwell

War is peace.jpg

I tested a long prompt in Firefly 3 (poor result), Flux 2 (too realistic result) and Gemini 3 (nice result).

I tried several times in Gemini until I got what I wanted.
I added the text, the old paper frame, the logo and fine-tuned the image with Photoshop.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

The composition perfectly reflects the slogan. Great work, as always, JR. The indifference of the people to the bombing going on outside of town lends a genuinely disturbing atmosphere to the scene.

Peru Bob

Community Expert

Newtons Laws Poster.png

Highway scene from Firefly.

Text and "no" symbol added with Photoshop on the Web.

O

Oh.N8

Open roads and new road trip

O

Oh.N8

Screenshot 2026-01-20 at 18.55.17.png

New Year: New Jellyfish Theme(s)
The Future is weightless. Thanks @AlanGilbertson for a fun exercise.
Firefly Gemini 2.5 to create the poster(s).
Photoshop to put the elements together and to add the floating happy Jellyfish characters.
Illustrator for Sponsor icon in the corner in the right.

AlanGilbertson

Author

Community Expert

Awesome, Nate! The poster reminds me of my childhood. I grew up on a Scottish island whose side hustle was catering to holidaymakers from Clydeside and Glasgow. Its heyday was in the 1930s, so there were buildings in exactly that style, sandy beaches (still there!), a mini funfair with a ferris wheel (not anymore), and even palm trees that still grow.

So glad to see the Return of the Jellies! 🤣

O

Oh.N8

Thanks. glad to take a walk down memory lane w ya.
Ahh... the Jellies will be around for awhile. They are good fun.
Did you take a look at the poster above the car?

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