Writing a prompt the way you would write a brief

Give a photographer the words most people type into an image model and they would ask you six questions before touching a camera. They would want to know how far away the camera is, what time of day it is, what the thing is sitting on, who the picture is for, why it exists and what would count as wrong. A model asks none of them. It answers anyway, using the most common answer to each, and the most common answer is what generic looks like. This whole module rests on the idea that a prompt is a brief, written for a collaborator who cannot ask you anything.

A brief, in an agency or a studio, is a short written statement of what a piece of work has to do, for whom, and what would count as wrong. Turned into a prompt it becomes a handful of plain decisions. There is the subject, the one thing the picture is about, described as exactly as you would describe it to a prop buyer. There is the setting and the surface underneath it, the distance and angle of the camera, the light and where it comes from, and the format the image will be used in. Then there is the constraint, meaning what may not appear, which is the half of a brief that does most of the work. Each of these takes one line.

The job is to answer those questions before the model does, and the way to do it is by deciding things instead of adding adjectives. Adjectives are what everybody reaches for first. Compare 'a stunning, professional photo of a perfume bottle, luxury, 8k' with 'a 50 ml clear glass perfume bottle with a matt black cap, standing on wet grey slate, seen from a metre away at eye level, late-afternoon sun from the left raking across the glass, square frame for a product page, nothing else in shot'. The first is a wish made of praise words, and it produces the same picture as everyone else's praise words. The second has made about ten decisions, and each one removes a choice the model would otherwise have made for you.

The companies that make these models say much the same thing in their own documentation. Google's guide to image generation with Gemini tells you to describe a scene in rich detail, because the more specific you are, the more control you have over the picture. Its template for a photorealistic picture names the type of shot, then the subject, then the setting, then the light, then the camera angle and the lens, which is almost the order a photographer's brief would take. Keep that order on any model. It puts the thing the picture is about first, and it gives every prompt you write the same structure, so a prompt that worked can be reused with one line changed when the model underneath is replaced.

The same logic holds when the collaborator is a language model writing copy, naming a product or drafting a shot list. Anthropic's guidance for its Claude models suggests treating the model as a brilliant but new employee who lacks context on your norms and workflows, and its golden rule is to show your prompt to a colleague with minimal context on the task, because if they would be confused, the model will be too. That is a good brief. Say who the work is for, what it will be used for, what good looks like and what to avoid, and include an example of something you liked whenever you have one.

A professional writes the brief before opening the tool, often as rough notes, and only then turns it into a prompt. When the first result comes back they judge it against the brief rather than against their mood, name the one decision that is wrong, and change only that line, because changing five things at once teaches you nothing about which of them mattered. They keep each prompt that worked alongside the picture it made, the model it ran on and the date. Over months, that becomes a library. A library like that outlasts any pack of magic words, because it records decisions about the brand rather than tricks that one model happened to like.