About FastGen · No story waits for a designer
Why FastGen exists: a newsroom tool that lets editors get on-brand posters out in minutes, while the design stays exactly as the creative director made it.
Breaking news, on brand.
Built for the minutes between a story breaking and the world seeing it.
11:40 p.m.
A story breaks. The photograph has come in, the facts are checked, the headline is written. Now it has to go out on Instagram, and it has to look like it came from your newsroom, not from whoever happened to be on shift.
In most newsrooms, this is the moment the news waits for the designer. Someone opens a file made for yesterday's story, types over the old headline, drags the logo back to where it used to be, hunts for the right font and exports. It takes a while on a good night. It takes longer when the designer has gone home and the person on the desk has never opened a design tool. And every time, the brand drifts a little: a logo a touch too big, a headline in the wrong weight, a colour nobody chose.
FastGen was built for that moment. At 11:40 p.m., the poster still looks like yours.
The designer builds it once. The editor tells the story.
Most news posters share the same bones: a photograph, a headline, a location, a source, the logo. The design barely changes. The news always does. So we separated the two jobs.
A designer (or creative director) builds a template once: the typefaces, the colours, the frame, where every element sits. Then they decide, control by control, what anyone else may change. An editor opens that template, drops in the photo, types the headline and exports a finished poster in minutes. What the editor isn't meant to touch isn't locked or greyed out. It simply isn't there.
The result is a newsroom where the person with the story can get the news out the moment it's ready, and every poster still looks unmistakably like yours.
FastGen doesn't replace your designer. It is how their work reaches every poster.
Arabic comes first
Too many design tools treat Arabic as an afterthought: letters that don't join, punctuation on the wrong side, a headline that turns itself around the moment a number appears. FastGen starts from Arabic. Right-to-left text, Arabic typefaces and headlines that mix Arabic and English are built in from the first word. Upload your own licensed fonts, and every poster carries your real typeface rather than a near-enough substitute.
Honest pictures
News photographs rarely arrive in the shape a post needs. FastGen can fill the empty space with a softened copy of the photo itself or, when you choose, extend the scene with AI so the picture fills the frame.
We drew one hard line. The AI only ever paints the empty space around a photograph. Your original is laid back on top, pixel for pixel, exactly where it was. Nothing the camera recorded is replaced by something a machine imagined. A person reviews every result before it goes out. In journalism, trust is the whole job, and a tool should never quietly spend it.
Why I built it
I watched editors fight a blank canvas. They are not designers, and they should not have to be. So I built FastGen.
What we believe
- The deadline decides. FastGen takes away the busywork, not the judgement. What goes out is always your newsroom's decision.
- Brand is craft. A template keeps your look intact, whoever is on shift.
- Arabic comes first. Built right-to-left from the start, not patched in later.
- Say what is true. We tell you what FastGen does and what it doesn't.
Safe for a newsroom
Your photographs, headlines, templates and fonts belong to your organization. No other organization can see them, and we never use them to train AI. Two-step sign-in and passkeys are available on every account. We never sell your data or show ads. The details are in our Privacy Policy.
How it works for your team
- Admins and creative directors build templates, choose what each one lets editors change, and look after the team, the fonts and the brand colours.
- Editors open a template, change what they're allowed to, and export, in the browser on a computer or a phone.
- Posters are drawn on your own device at full resolution and exported as JPEG or PNG, in the sizes newsrooms use.
Where we're going
FastGen is young, and it is shaped by the newsrooms that use it. If something slows your team down, or you wish FastGen did something it doesn't, tell us through the Contact us page inside FastGen, or at hi@fastgenplus.com. The next feature may well start with your message.