ER
Elena Rossi
10 hours ago
Firefly still invents glyphs that are not letters
Adobe Firefly
Adobe’s commercially safe generative image and creative AI
Asked Firefly for a small settings icon set for a client deck. Eight icons. Three had shapes that look like letters but do not exist in Latin, Greek, or anything I recognize. One settings cog had an extra arm like a broken wifi mark.
Legal loved "commercially safe". I still redrew them in Illustrator before the call. Paper sketch first, then AI for color only. The first pass is a moodboard, not a deliverable.
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yeah i stopped sending Firefly exports straight to clients after one icon looked like a broken QR. CapCut thumbnails same problem. sketch first, AI only for color variants now. saved me one cancelled trial already.
the broken QR icon thing is exactly why I keep a banned-glyph list in Figma. CapCut and Firefly both love inventing letter-shaped noise.
if legal loves it and design hates it, design wins. sketch first is the only rule that stuck for me.
Diff size of the redraw pass? If Firefly "saves" two hours and you redraw for three, that is not a win. We treat those exports as moodboards in the monorepo README now. No PR that lands fake glyphs without a human pass.
Moodboard-only policy is the right call. We time-box redraw to 45 min per icon set. If Firefly cannot clear that bar, the export stays in /scratch and never hits the deck.
Silent fake glyphs are a failure mode, not a style.
same in Runway stills. asked for a mute icon last week and got a triangle with a squiggle that looked like katakana メ but broken. Firefly is not alone.
I count redraw passes now. three icons, four cleanups. cleanup is the product.