AF7620 Chap.2 Style Language and Prompt Craft
Style Language and Prompt Craft
A style is a system, not an adjective
The guest lecture on design styles opens with a joke that makes a serious point: we hoped AI would cook, clean, do the laundry and take out the rubbish, and instead it chats, paints, writes, composes and plays games. If machines now produce images on request, what the human brings is the ability to say which image and why. The lecture's answer is style fluency.
It walks through Modernism, the Bauhaus, Minimalism, Art Deco, Pop Art, the Swiss or International Typographic Style, Psychedelic design, Postmodernism, Brutalism, Flat Design and Contemporary work, and argues that each is a complete ecosystem formed by its culture and history, its materials, its mood and its forms.
Three forces that make a style
Three forces are named.
Culture supplies the traditions, beliefs and social behaviour that fix what colours, symbols and imagery mean. Technology supplies the toolkit, from the printing press to the latest AI tools, and so decides what a style can physically do. Artistic movements supply new perspectives and techniques that later designers borrow.
When you can name a style you can also name what it values: the Swiss style's grid and sans-serif type value clarity, while Psychedelic posters value intensity over legibility.
The lecture lists three payoffs of this fluency: a keener sense of where visual taste is heading, real control over what an AI tool produces, and the words to brief a collaborator exactly.
Building a prompt in layers
The prompt workflow taught in the course starts from one required element, the subject.
Style comes next, either as a style modifier or as an artist reference, then format, the type of image such as a photograph or a charcoal drawing. Optional layers follow: a quality booster, repetition of the key idea to strengthen it, moods or emotions, a viewpoint such as through a porthole, and exclusions that name what must not appear.
References can be mixed with weights, for example seventy-five per cent of one artist and twenty-five of another. The order matters because each later layer refines the earlier ones rather than replacing them.
Borrow the questions a photographer asks
For realistic frames the course suggests thinking like a photographer. How is the picture composed and what is its emotional tone?
How close are we to the subject, from what angle, and with how much depth of field? Where does the light come from, is it natural or artificial, what colour is it and what time of day? Which camera or lens, macro, telephoto or wide? Is it shot in a studio or on location, on film or digital?
Each answer becomes a phrase in the prompt, and each one removes a guess the model would otherwise make for you.
Known failure modes
The lecture's collected tips double as a list of traps. Several characters in one scene tend to merge their features. Changing the style can also change which objects appear. Lettering usually comes out garbled.
A consistent seed image keeps a series on brand, inpainting fixes parts of an image, and outpainting extends a frame so that pieces can be stitched together. Copyright and commercial-use restrictions must be checked for every output.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why style fluency now matters more than ever
- 02
The main graphic design styles from Modernism to Contemporary
- 03
Culture, technology and artistic movements
- 04
The layered prompt workflow
- 05
Weighted mixing and exclusions
- 06
Photographer's questions as prompt phrases
- 07
Seeds, inpainting and outpainting
- 08
Known failure modes of image models
Worked example · free
Rebuild a weak prompt for a pitch frame
- 2Replace the vague subject with a specific one.
- 3Add style, format and viewpoint layers.
- 3Add mood, lighting and an exclusion, and justify each.
Key terms
- Style Fluency
- The ability to name visual styles and what each values, so that you can direct an AI tool and brief collaborators precisely instead of using vague adjectives.
- Swiss Style
- The International Typographic Style, a design approach built on grids, sans-serif type and clean layouts that put clarity and legibility first.
- Style Modifier
- The part of a prompt that names a visual style or an artist reference, placed after the subject so that it shapes how the subject is drawn.
- Exclusion Prompt
- An instruction listing what must not appear in a generated image, such as text, watermarks or modern objects in a period scene.
- Inpainting
- Editing part of a generated image by erasing a region and prompting the model to regenerate only that area.
- Outpainting
- Extending a generated image beyond its original borders so that a wider frame can be built and stitched together.
Style Language and Prompt Craft FAQ
How long should an image prompt be?
Long enough to remove the guesses that matter and no longer. The course workflow treats the subject as the only required element and adds style, format, mood, viewpoint and exclusions only where they change the frame. A short prompt that names a specific subject and a defensible style usually outperforms a long list of adjectives, and some tools also cap prompt length.
Why do characters look different from one image to the next?
Image models generate each frame independently, so clothing, age and features wander unless something holds them in place. Describing visible traits consistently at each shot distance helps, and using a consistent seed or reference image helps more, but reliable identity usually needs a fine-tuned adapter, which Chapter 7 covers.
Assessment move
Pick three styles from the lecture and, for each, write one sentence naming what it values and one prompt phrase that would call it up. Then generate the same subject in all three and note which details changed beyond the look, because the lecture warns that style also changes content.
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