Your Design Workflow

Skill is nice, a routine is better

Everything in this course collapses into one idea: the people who get consistently good images are not the ones with the cleverest prompts. They are the ones who do the same seven things in the same order, so the decisions get made at the point where they are cheap.

Cleverness is unreliable. It shows up on a good Tuesday and abandons you at half past four on a Friday when the newsletter has to go out. A routine works on both days, which is the entire argument for having one.

So here is the routine. It takes about a page, and you will stop needing to read it after a fortnight.

The seven steps

1. Decide what happens if this is only approximately right. Decorative, and you should spend ten minutes. Permanent, physical or public facing, and you are either doing real work or hiring somebody. From lesson one, and still the most useful single question in the course.

2. Decide where the exact bits will come from. Text, logo, precise brand colours and anything that must sit in a specific place are added by you afterwards. Settle that before you generate, so you are not trying to force the tool to do the part it cannot do.

3. Paste your house style block. The fixed description you wrote in lesson four. If you have not written it yet, that is the twenty minutes with the best return in this whole course.

4. Write the subject line, and only the subject line. One specific sentence about who or what and what they are doing, plus composition. Then your exclusions. Nothing else moves.

5. Generate, then change one thing. Save anything you like before you start altering the brief. One adjustment per attempt so you learn which words are doing work. Stop when it is good enough for the use you identified in step one, which is usually earlier than your instincts want.

6. Finish it properly. Crop it deliberately. Set the exact colours. Add the type in your actual typeface. Place the logo. This is the step that separates work that looks considered from work that looks generated, and it usually takes less time than one more attempt would have.

7. Run the checklist below, then file it. Save the final image with the brief that produced it, in the folder you are building. Future you is doing the same job again in six weeks.

Before anything gets published

Six checks. Under two minutes, and they catch nearly everything embarrassing.

TEXT. Read every letter in the image, slowly. If any words were generated
rather than added by me, either fix them properly or remove them.


DETAIL. Look at hands, eyes, jewellery, reflections, background objects,
and anywhere two things overlap. Then look at it small, and at full size.


RECOGNISABLE. Does anything resemble a real brand, a real person, a known
character or a named artist's distinctive work? If yes, change it.


CLAIMS. Does this image imply something about my product, my results or my
premises that is not true? An image can make a claim without a single word.


FAMILY. Put it beside the last three things I published. Does it belong?


PROVENANCE. Note the tool, the date and the brief in my folder.

Check three deserves a second look on anything going into paid advertising, packaging or signage, and lesson five explains where the professional line sits. Check four is the one people skip and regret, because a photograph of a queue outside a shop that is not your shop is a claim, whatever the caption says.

Two prompts worth keeping

I need an image for [where it will appear and what it needs to do].
The rough idea in my head is [describe it badly, that is fine].
Turn this into a specific image brief covering: subject and action, style,
composition and crop, lighting, mood, and what to exclude.
Then tell me:

Which parts of my idea are abstract and cannot actually be drawn,
and what visible thing could stand in for each.
Which parts I should add myself afterwards instead of generating.
Two alternative directions I have not considered.

Here is the brief I am about to use: [paste it].
It will be seen by [audience] in [context].
Be critical rather than encouraging.

Which clauses would change nothing if I deleted them?
Where have I left a gap the tool will fill with the most generic option?
What is missing that I have not thought to specify?
Anything here that names a brand, a real person, a character or a living artist?

Where this fits with everything else

Images are rarely the whole job. They usually sit inside something bigger, and the rest of that is covered elsewhere.

If these images are going into campaigns, social posts, newsletters or landing pages, AI for Marketing and Content covers the words and the planning that sit around them. If they are going into decks, AI for Presentations is the natural next step and shares the same finish it properly principle.

Before you paste a customer photograph, an unreleased product shot or anything confidential into a tool as a reference, AI Safety, Privacy and Verification is the one to read, because the rights lesson here deliberately stopped short of the privacy side. And if the briefing lesson was the part that clicked, Prompt Engineering generalises the same habit to everything else you ask a model to do.

If you are running the whole thing yourself, AI for Small Business puts these pieces in the order a business actually needs them. Not sure what to take next? Start here.

What to carry out of this course

Three things, if you forget everything else.

These tools are strong when an image needs to feel like something and weak when it needs to be something, so give them the feeling and keep the facts yourself. Consistency comes from repeating a fixed written style, not from finding a magic phrase. And the exact elements, your type, your logo, your colours, are added by you at the end, which is also the step that makes the whole thing look deliberate.

The rest is just doing it a few times. You will be quicker at this in a month than you expect to be, mostly because you will stop trying to make the tool do the two or three things it was never going to do.