Five Layers, One Poster
A loud cut-and-paste event poster where the materials are stacked in a fixed order — ground, shapes, photograph, ornament, type — so the noise has a structure under it. Seven fields.
Two runs of the same template. A live build session in fluorescent indigo beside a New Year sea swim in fluorescent orange — one bright each, the same five levels, and the photograph torn out at the same place in the stack.
Generated from this template with the fields shown above — the five layers are readable from the back forward: black to all four edges, indigo blocks and two halftone circles, the room torn out with a ragged white edge, stars and a checkerboard strip along the base, and every word on top with nothing over it. Each material appears at exactly one level. The date badge rings once, which is the specific thing the reference's own baseline got wrong — it printed the same date around the top and the bottom of its badge, a repetition that reads as a printing fault. Run-to-run quirks: the number of stars varies, and the torn edge is sometimes cleaner than a real tear.
Generated for this library
Input
Event Vibary's first live build session
Word SHIPPED
Line one prompt · one hour · one page, live
Band VIBE CODING NIGHT
Date 18.07 - Saturday, doors at seven
Photo a room watching a wall-sized screen mid-render
Bright fluorescent indigo · motif: the play wedge
Returned 1 poster · 2:3 · black border, five layers
L1 ground black to all four edges, holding the poster in
L2 shapes flat indigo and white blocks, plus two halftone
circles - halftone lives only here
L3 photo the room cut out with hard jagged edges, sitting on
the shapes and under everything above
L4 ornament black stars, a checkerboard strip, small wedges -
checkerboard lives only here
L5 type SHIPPED across the top in heavy white sans, the line
reversed out of a black block, the pixel band along
the base, and the date badge - ringed once, not twice
verdict six materials, five levels, nothing floatingYou fill in 7 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1The event
- 2The big word
- 3The line under it
- 4The bottom band
- 5The date
- 6The photograph
- 7The one bright, and the motif
Five Layers, One Poster
Produce ONE image: a loud cut-and-paste event poster. Follow every line below. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.
First — do you have the fields?
If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.
Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.
The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.
If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.
Fields — replace these seven lines only
- The event: {what this is for} e.g. Vibary's first live build session
- The big word: {one word, all caps} e.g. SHIPPED
- The line under it: {one short line} e.g. one prompt · one hour · one page, live
- The bottom band: {two or three words, all caps} e.g. VIBE CODING NIGHT
- The date: {a date, and a time or a day} e.g. 18.07 — Saturday, doors at seven
- The photograph: {what it shows, cut out hard} e.g. a room of people watching a wall-sized screen mid-render, shot from the back, cut out with hard edges
- The one bright, and the motif: {one fluorescent colour · one shape} e.g. fluorescent indigo #5B5BD6 as the only bright · the motif is the play wedge
The stacking law
This style is a pile of materials, and a pile with no order is a mess however good each piece is. The genre's own templates ask for several textures "layered richly but not chaotically" and then leave the layering to chance, which is how you get a halftone circle on top of a headline and the same date printed twice.
Five layers, in this order, every time:
- Ground — flat black, running to all four edges. It is the frame, and nothing sits behind it.
- Shapes — flat blocks and arcs in the bright and in white, plus the halftone circles. Halftone exists only here.
- Photograph — one image, cut out with hard, slightly ragged edges, sitting on the shapes and beneath everything above.
- Ornament — stars, a checkerboard strip, small motif marks. Checkerboard exists only here.
- Type — every word in the poster. Nothing is ever drawn on top of the type.
An element may only touch the layer directly below it. A star may overlap the photograph; the photograph may not overlap the type. If something needs to sit above type to work, the composition is wrong, not the rule.
The layers in detail
Ground. Black to the edges. A visible black margin all round, thicker at the base than the top.
Shapes. Two or three flat blocks in the bright, one or two in white, and two halftone circles in the bright at different sizes. Hard edges, no gradients, no transparency except where the fields ask for it once.
Photograph. One only. Cut out along a hand-torn contour, not a neat rectangle. It occupies the upper-middle third and is the only photographic material on the poster.
Ornament. Black four-point stars, one checkerboard strip, and three or four small motif marks. Small, scattered with intent, never in a row.
Type. Four texts and no more:
- the big word across the top, heavy sans, white, near edge to edge
- the line under it, reversed white out of a solid black block
- the bottom band, pixel-face caps, white on black, anchoring the base
- the date badge: a filled circle in the bright, the day large at its centre, and a single ring of small text around it. The ring says the date once. Repeating it top and bottom is the genre's most common error and looks like a printing fault.
The colour law
- One bright, named in the fields, plus black and white. That is the entire palette.
- A second bright is what turns this style unreadable, and no amount of arrangement rescues it.
- All fills flat. No gradients anywhere, including inside the halftone.
Never
- ✕ anything drawn on top of the type
- ✕ a material appearing at two layers — halftone in the ornament, checkerboard in the shapes
- ✕ a second bright colour
- ✕ the date said twice, or any text repeated anywhere
- ✕ more than one photograph, or a soft-edged cut-out
- ✕ drop shadows, glows, bevels, 3D, or paper texture over the whole poster
The result
A poster that shouts and still reads: six materials at five fixed levels, one bright doing all the pointing, and a stack you can name from the back forward — which is why it stays legible at the size a poster is actually seen.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Replace the seven FIELDS lines. Choose the photograph first — everything else is arranged around where it sits in the stack.
- Paste it into any image-capable agent or model, in one message. One run returns the poster.
- Check it by layer, not by taste: is anything on top of the type, is any material appearing at two levels, does the date appear once. Those three are what go wrong.
What you swap
- The event
- Vibary's first live build session
- The big word
- SHIPPED
- The line under it
- one prompt · one hour · one page, live
- The bottom band
- VIBE CODING NIGHT
- The date
- 18.07 — Saturday, doors at seven
- The photograph
- a room of people watching a wall-sized screen mid-render, shot from the back, cut out with hard edges
- The one bright, and the motif
- fluorescent indigo #5B5BD6 as the only bright · the motif is the play wedge
Before it runs
- One photograph that survives being cut out badly on purpose. A soft-edged or busy image turns to soup at this size.
- One bright colour. Two is what makes these posters unreadable, and every template in the genre quietly allows two.
- A word short enough to run edge to edge. Eight letters is comfortable, twelve is a squeeze.
When to reach for it
For a gig, a market, a fair, a club night: anything that has to shout from a wall or a feed. The style is easy to make busy and hard to make legible, and the difference is entirely whether the layers were ordered before they were drawn.
What changes
- One poster with five named layers in a fixed stacking order, so every element knows what it sits on and what may sit on it.
- Each material appears at exactly one layer — halftone in the shapes, checkerboard in the ornament, pixels in the type — so six textures read as a system rather than a scramble.
- The photograph is cut with hard edges and lives in the middle of the stack, never on top of the type and never behind the ground.
- One fluorescent colour does the pointing; black and white do the structure. A second bright is the thing that turns this style into mush.
- A date badge that says the date once, which the genre's own templates routinely get wrong by ringing it twice.
Pairs with
- Four Textures, One FrameA loud Memphis-style event poster bordered by repeating type, where each geometric texture belongs to exactly one kind of element — dots to figures, stripes to props, grid to the floor. Seven fields.
- Halftone Meets PhotographA travel-poster collage where a dotted field above and a real photograph below meet along one seam — and the dots cross into the picture rather than stopping at its edge. Six fields.
- One Number, Three BandsA black-and-gold countdown poster where one huge numeral holds the middle in clear air, and every other fact is said exactly once, in one of three bands. Six fields.