I had a brand guide due Monday. It was Saturday at 7 PM. The brand was for my own business — Artifice & Intelligence — which means I had no client to delay, no creative director to call, and no excuse not to ship.

So I sat down with Claude and we built it together in 45 minutes. Below is the actual conversation, mostly unedited, with my notes on what worked and what I would do differently.

This is what The Lab is for. Real prompts. Real outputs. Real mistakes. Twice a week.

The setup

I had: a name (Artifice & Intelligence), a tagline (the craft of working with AI), a vague aesthetic in my head (alchemical, witchy, warm-black-and-cream), and some scattered visual references in a Pinterest board I hadn't cleaned up since 2019.

I needed: a one-page guide a designer could hand to Framer and end up with a site that looked like me.

My usual mistake here is to over-prep. I open Notion, build a brief, get sidetracked into the structure of the brief, and lose the night. So I tried something else: dump everything into Claude, raw, and see what came back.

The first prompt — and why it was wrong

Prompt 1 · The almost-prompt
Make me a brand guide for my AI consulting practice. The brand is called Artifice & Intelligence. The vibe is witchy and warm. Use black, cream, and gold.

This is the prompt I almost used. It would have produced a generic brand guide. Black, cream, gold + "witchy and warm" = a thousand Squarespace templates that look exactly the same.

The problem isn't that the prompt is short. The problem is that it doesn't give Claude anything specific to push against. Claude reflects what you give it. Generic in, generic out.

The prompt that worked

Prompt 2 · The one I actually used
I'm building the brand guide for my creative consulting practice, Artifice & Intelligence. Its tagline is "the craft of working with AI." The audience is creative pros and founders who are tired of AI hype and want to learn from someone who's actually using these tools every day. My voice is direct, witchy, and never corporate — "let me show you what I found" instead of "unlock your potential." I want the visual brand to reclaim the word ARTIFICE: skill, art, clever devices. Not stock-photo-of-circuits AI. More like an alchemist's workbench. Make me a brand guide with: positioning lines (3 alts), color palette with hex codes and exact usage notes, type pairings (header + body, with web fallbacks), photography rules (what's in, what's out), and a one-paragraph "voice in 60 seconds" for new collaborators. Avoid: the word 'sleek,' blue, anything that says 'innovative.'

This prompt is longer, but every line earns its place:

  • It names the audience (so Claude can write to them, not at them).
  • It quotes my actual voice, not just describes it.
  • It gives a metaphor (alchemist's workbench) and a negative example (stock-photo-of-circuits AI).
  • It lists the exact deliverables — color palette, type pairings, photo rules, voice paragraph — so Claude knows what done looks like.
  • It bans the words that AI tools love ("sleek," "innovative") and pre-empts the failure modes.

The output — what Claude sent back

Claude returned a 2,000-word draft with palette, type, photo rules, and a voice paragraph that was about 80% usable. The colors were warm-black + cream + gold + copper, which I kept. The type pairing it suggested was Cormorant Garamond + IBM Plex Mono — I kept the IBM Plex side and swapped the serif. Voice paragraph nailed the rhythm but slipped into one piece of corporate language I had to cut ("empowers practitioners").

More important than what was in the draft: the structure. Once I had the structure, I could spend the remaining 30 minutes editing for taste — which is where I actually add value — instead of fighting a blank page.

What I would do differently

  • Add 2–3 brand references by name in the prompt. Aesop, Coca-Cola of the early '00s, the New Yorker. References anchor the conversation faster than adjectives.
  • Ask for the brand guide in passes, not all at once. Pass 1: positioning + voice. Pass 2: visual. Pass 3: applications. Each pass is sharper because the previous one is locked.
  • Save the rejected drafts. The "almost" version is often a better starting point for the next project.

The takeaway

AI is a creative practice, not a search engine. The prompt is the brief. If you wouldn't hand the brief to a junior designer, don't hand it to Claude.

— L.

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