February 20, 2026 Newsletter Companion - Category Covers

February 20, 2026 Newsletter Companion – Category Covers

February 28, 2026

Here are some of my favorite cover images for the week ending February 20, 2026.

For this week’s cover image, I wanted to reference the tension between the Pentagon and Anthropic, so I used the promotional poster from the classic ’80s movie WarGames. I gave Gemini’s Nano Banana 2 the task, since this week also marks the release of the latest image model from Google.

I’m convinced that dictating prompts with as much context as possible is the best bet for most tasks. Ethan Mollick recently concurred.

I gave the original (vertical) promotional poster for the movie to Gemini, and this is literally my prompt, yapping with no editing.

PROMPT (dictated): “This is a promotional movie poster for a old movie called WarGames. I’d like to use this as an inspiration for a landscape image that will become the cover of my AI newsletter. There’ll be some differences from the image that I’m sharing, and I’d like to walk you through them. First, it’s going to be landscape, so that’s important. Second, I want the font to be very similar, so the WarGames font with the capital W and the capital G and the way that it’s aligned and the way it’s kind of spaced out, I want that font to be very similar. Instead of the words WarGames, we’re going to have the title of my newsletter. The title will be AI News 126: 2026/02/27. I usually put it in one line, and since this is a landscape image, that should not be a problem. For the white text at the bottom that has all the different credits, I want to use some of the terms from this week’s newsletter. Here they are: Anthropic, Pentagon, Google, OpenAI, Dario Amodei, Pete Hegseth, DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, Claude, Distillation, NanoBanana, Nvidia, Meta, Robotics, DreamDojo, Sonic, Stargate, Perplexity, OpenClaw. I don’t need to keep the tagline that says, is it a game or is it real? And I also don’t need the man looking at the computer with his hand on the keyboard with the woman with her hand on his shoulder. I would like to keep the war room looking iconography from the top that has the series of computer screens with that 1984 style or 70s style display with the simple graphics. Instead of saying missile warning or sub-launched detection, we can use anthropic and OpenAI. My theme of my newsletter is artificial intelligence, which is why I’m using that text. We’ll want everything to be in a composition that supports that landscape mode, and we want it to be clear and legible, and we want it to be laid out so that it has a good balance of aesthetics. You’ll need to think about how to incorporate that wide landscape and leave enough room at the bottom for the title and the white text.”

With the main cover made, I decided to see if Google Gemini could continue the conversation straight from the image for the cover into my category covers, so I gave Gemini my Python scripts dynamically create 55 covers.

Google Gemini read the Python and provided all of the command-line responses I would need for the Python scripts to capture the theme. It did a remarkable job, all within one tool.

PROMPT: I have few Python scripts that I use to create category cover prompts for my weekly newsletter. I’ve attached them here (along with the category text file). I’d like you to read them, understand them, and then help me use the image we just made from the war games poster to help me go through that capture theme Python script and provide me with the answers I would need to give really crisp, clear directions in the command line, when I run the python script. I want to create a series of compelling category covers that match the theme, style, and mood, of the poster that we just built. It’s the war games theme. It’s important to maintain good balance, aesthetic, and clarity. We want to be sure to keep the theme, but incorporate something that creatively ties in the categories. If we make it too complicated, sometimes the image tools have trouble because the prompt overbakes the solution. I want to make sure these are really cool title category covers that pop and effect the viewer with their mix of nailing the theme and the category, and figuring out ways to tie the foreboding risk of War Games into each category. We should answer the question of how each caegory could lead to unintended bad outcomes. I would also like the category name to be in bold title text in that great red big font across each of our category covers.

CLI Inputs
Short name for this week’s theme (for you): WarGames AI Risk

One-sentence logline (how you’d describe the theme to a friend): A 1980s Cold War bunker aesthetic exploring the foreboding, unintended consequences of each AI category, featuring bold red typography.

Longer description (a few sentences on the idea, metaphors, etc.): We are channeling the 1983 movie WarGames, specifically the dark NORAD war room with its glowing map displays, CRT monitors, and high-stakes tension. Each image should reflect the specific AI category as a potential vector for a global crisis or unintended bad outcome (e.g., a “Robotics” screen showing autonomous units going off-grid, or “Alignment” showing a chaotic, unreadable decision matrix). The visual metaphor should rely on retro-tech interfaces, dark silhouettes of operators, and glowing data.

Visual style keywords (e.g. ‘minimalist, neon…’): 1980s retro-futurism, NORAD war room, CRT monitors, vector graphics, glowing wireframes, dark silhouettes, cinematic lighting, foreboding, techno-thriller, large bold red typography.

Color palette / mood: Deep pitch black, glowing neon wireframe blue and amber for screens, bright alarm red for the primary text and warning lights. High contrast, moody, tense.

Global constraints (e.g. ‘no text overlays…’): Keep the composition uncluttered to avoid overbaking the image model. The exact category name MUST be displayed prominently in a large, bold, red, retro sans-serif font. Focus on one strong central retro-tech metaphor per category. Avoid modern sleek UIs; keep it strictly 80s analog/early digital.

I ran the image through Google Veo and Grok Imagine to see if it would animate. Grok did the better job.

PROMPT: The screen glitches, as if there is a static there is a slow zoom of the red title towards the screen.

I added Games Without Frontiers for the sound.

I’ve created this page with all of the category cover images (because I like sharing them with my friend John Bayalis aka human artist and good sport, Fenwick Designs). None of this came from me. Not even the prompts. It’s just the result of my initial prompt (at the top) to modify the War Games poster.

Click any image to see the full prompts (below).