AI / Design Communication & Image Prompting
From Brand Tone to Design Principles
Turn 'young, professional, warm' into sentences you can make tradeoffs with
Our brand tone is: [3 adjectives + a short description]. Turn it into 4 design principles. Each one must: 1) Be a sentence usable for making tradeoffs, e.g. 'Better to drop one entry point than to make the primary action something users have to hunt for'; 2) Come with one good example and one counterexample, down to UI elements; 3) Name which other principle it conflicts with, and which one wins; 4) Describe how it is most likely to be misused. Do not output a list of adjectives, and do not write 'user-centered' or anything else that applies to every product.
How to use
Keep at least one of the three adjectives negative; boundaries are easier to enforce than positive adjectives.
Good for
- The team agrees on the tone in the abstract but every tradeoff turns into an argument — the adjectives need to become sentences that can settle the disagreement in the room.
- When new hires or contractors join and need a standard they can self-check against — principles with good and bad examples beat the adjectives in the brand book.
Not for
- The brand tone itself is unsettled (the founder and the marketing lead disagree) — align the tone first; converting it to principles now only cements the split.
- You need visual rules (type sizes, color values, corner radii) — those are execution standards, not tradeoff principles; that is a spacing handoff.
Example
Input
Brand tone: restrained, professional, with a dry sense of humor. The product is a project-management tool for designers
What you get
Four principles that can settle an argument, e.g. 'Better to drop one entry point than to make the primary action something users have to hunt for', with a good example (one primary button, secondary actions in a menu) and a counterexample (three equally weighted colored buttons). Each names what it conflicts with and who wins — when it clashes with dry humor, error states keep clarity. It ends by naming the failure mode: turning 'restrained' into grey that cannot be read.
Common mistakes
- Returning a list of adjectives plus 'find the balance' — it sounds right and still cannot decide a concrete disagreement, so the principle does no work.
- Writing 'user-centered' or 'less is more' into the principles — those hold for every product, which means you have no principles.
Try tweaking it like this
- Require each principle to come with 'what a screenshot that violates it looks like' — people spot the problem faster than from a good example.
- Change 'four principles' to 'three plus one explicit objection' — adding a reverse principle (what we refuse to become) sharpens the boundary.