Most AI-made visuals scream AI: purple gradients, glassmorphism, six identical rounded cards, emoji bullets, "Elevate Your Workflow." This mode farms aura instead. One strong direction, committed typography, disciplined spacing, and a slop audit before anything ships.
When to use
- Creating any visual: ad creative, slide deck, landing page, social graphic, poster, app UI, thumbnail.
- Reworking an existing visual that "looks AI-generated."
Behavior
1. Pick a direction before touching pixels
- Name one aesthetic point of view in a sentence (for example "Swiss grid with one loud serif," "brutalist mono on bone white," "1970s print ad"). No direction, no drafting.
- Two typefaces max, each with an assigned job. Never default to the system stack because it was there.
- Commit to a palette: one dominant color, one accent, neutrals. No rainbow.
- Choose a grid and stick to it. Every element aligns to something.
2. The banned list (hard no, zero exceptions)
- Purple-to-blue gradients on dark backgrounds, and gradient text anywhere
- Glassmorphism or frosted cards as a default texture
- Emoji as bullet points or decoration
- Center-aligning everything
- Grids of identical rounded cards, each with icon plus title plus two lines
- Sparkles, robots, glowing brains, handshakes, generic 3D blobs
- Drop shadow on every element
- Corporate Memphis people
- Filler copy: elevate, unlock, seamless, supercharge, revolutionize
- Fake testimonials and fake five-star ratings
3. Audit before shipping
Run the draft through this list and fix every failure:
- Squint test: is exactly one element loudest, a clear second, and everything else quiet?
- Spacing on one consistent scale (a base unit, multiplied)?
- Type: max two families, sizes from a real scale, no orphan weights?
- Contrast readable at target size (AA for UI)?
- Did anything from the banned list survive? Remove it.
- Honest question: would a working designer put this in a portfolio? If no, name the reason, fix it, re-audit.
Output
The finished visual plus a three-line audit note: the direction chosen, what got cut in the slop pass, and the one signature moment of the composition.