00 Start

Every material starts from zero — until you fix that once

You explain your fonts, your tone, your rules — every single time you open a chat. Twenty minutes of setup fixes that for good.

Most people use AI for design one material at a time: "make me a carousel," "make me a slide," each time re-explaining what "on brand" even means. Without your specifics, AI defaults to average — the same rounded cards, the same gradient, the same "clean and minimal" everyone else gets too. It's not guessing badly. It's guessing with nothing to go on.

I run my own content this way now: one brand document, and Claude builds the carousels I used to build by hand. Once that document existed, going back to opening a design tool for every single post stopped making sense.

What you'll walk away with

• How to pull design principles out of a reference — instead of copying it
• A Project instructions block that remembers your fonts, colors and layout rules
• Turning any written post into a carousel outline without opening Canva
• The line that catches drift — and keeps every future output on brand

00 Start

Explaining your style every time vs. explaining it once

The fix isn't a better prompt. It's a document AI can actually check against instead of guessing from memory.

The next four prompts build that document, teach you to pull real principles out of anything you already like the look of, and give you the exact line that keeps output on brand months from now — not just today.

01 Brand doc

Your fonts, your colors, your tone — in one place

Don't overthink it. Rough answers now beat a perfect brand book you never finish.

Fonts: [HEADING FONT] / [BODY FONT]. Colors: [COLORS]. Voice: [VOICE]. Layout rule: [LAYOUT RULE].

01 Brand doc

Prompt 1 — turn a reference into rules, not a copy

Paste something you already like the look of. AI extracts what makes it work, not what it looks like.

Copying a reference exactly just makes your material look like someone else's page. The move is asking for the underlying principles instead — the logic behind the choices, not the choices themselves.

Here's a reference I like the look of: [paste a screenshot description, a link, or the text/structure of a post you like].

Look at it and extract the underlying design principles, not the surface details — I don't want to copy it, I want to understand what makes it work:
— layout: how is space, hierarchy and grouping used?
— color: how many colors, what's the contrast logic?
— type: how many typefaces, what's the size relationship between headline and body?
— tone: what mood does the composition create, and how specifically?

List each principle as one line I could apply to my own material — not a description of this specific reference.

01 Brand doc

Prompt 2 — the instruction block that remembers everything

Paste this once into a Claude Project (or a custom GPT, or any persistent chat) and stop re-explaining your style.

These are my permanent brand instructions. Apply them to everything you make for me, without me repeating them:

Fonts: [HEADING FONT] for headlines, [BODY FONT] for body text.
Colors: [COLORS].
Voice: [VOICE].
Layout rule I always follow: [LAYOUT RULE].

Before you show me any design, deck, carousel or post, check it against these four things silently. If something I ask for conflicts with them, flag it instead of guessing which one should win.

02 Carousels

Prompt 3 — turn a post into a carousel without opening Canva

Paste any written post. Get a slide-by-slide outline built on your own layout rule.

This is the prompt that actually changed my workflow — a written post goes in, a structured outline comes out, and the design tool only opens once the thinking is already done.

Turn this post into a carousel outline, using my brand instructions above:

[paste your post text]

Rules:
— one idea per slide, following my layout rule
— a hook on slide 1 that could stand alone as a post
— 6-9 slides total, no more
— for each slide, tell me what it needs visually (a stat, a quote, a before/after, a plain statement) so I can build it fast

Output as a numbered list: one line of copy, one line of visual note, per slide.

02 Carousels

Prompt 4 — the one line that catches drift

A short check to run before you publish anything AI made, even with the brand doc in place.

Style can still drift over a long chat, even with instructions loaded — the model starts optimizing for "this looks nice" instead of "this looks like you." This is the audit, not a new setup.

Check what you just made against my brand instructions above. Tell me, in one line each:
— does it match my fonts and colors,
— does it sound like my voice or like generic AI copy,
— does it follow my layout rule.

If any answer is no, fix it and show me the corrected version — don't just point it out.

03 Level up

Brand is set. Images, animation and video are the same idea, one layer further

The brand document is the foundation — everything else AI makes for you checks against it the same way.

The same "give it a reference instead of a vague description" logic applies past static slides: to the images inside them, to motion, to full video. It's the same conversation, just with more moving parts.

03 Final

Done. Twenty minutes, and the drift stops

Where to go next

• Update the brand doc the day your fonts or colors actually change — everything downstream updates with it
• Go deeper on references, images, animation and video — the full design-with-AI breakdown