The prompt-element taxonomy — what language steers AI image generation

The core idea

Two systems, kept separate on purpose

The single most useful move is to separate which world a design lives in from how bold it is. They're independent: a risograph can be quiet or loud; "loud" can be expressed in any medium. Keeping them apart is what turns a vague brief into a set of dials you can actually turn.

Aesthetic = which world

Medium, era, reference-world, palette, lighting, focal subject. Swapping a value changes the design's identity, not its loudness. "Risograph" and "linocut" are equally bold — different worlds.

Boldness = how far from safe

Artifact density, ink coverage, composition risk, the safe↔bold dial. Turning these up departs from the airy, mediumless, centered "AI-default" — without changing which world you chose.

Two more systems support these: structural-craft (the phrasing mechanics that make a value actually render and stay buildable) and mock-only (the extra axes a full-page layout adds). Build-safety always sits below the dial — no boldness level may break legibility, font-overflow, or the page's structure.

What we mean by "style"

Style isn't one axis — it's medium × world × posture

When people say "style" they usually mean all three at once. We split them into medium (how it's made), world (the aesthetic universe), and posture (the brand's personality) — so you can cross any medium with any world (18 mediums × 43 worlds ≈ 770 combinations) and set the posture on top. Below: the same Redwood content, only the style dimension changed. Naming an opinionated medium is the highest-leverage lever — the primary escape from the generic default.

A1 · Medium — how it's physically made

risograph — **Risograph**3 spot inks · halftone · misregistration

silkscreen — **Silkscreen**flat knockout layers · registration offset

linocut — **Linocut**carved gouge chatter · ink build-up

sign painter — **Sign-painter**gold-leaf · painted drop shadow · distress

gouache — **Gouache**opaque matte flats · brush edges

Full A1 catalog (18): risograph · silkscreen · linocut · woodblock · letterpress/wood-type · offset litho · Ben-Day comic · cyanotype · scratchboard · xerox-zine · gouache · watercolor · editorial photo · 35mm film · cut-paper collage · and 3 finishes (gold-leaf · ceramic tile · embroidered patch — badge-only, ship as a fixed asset).

A3 · World — what aesthetic universe it's from

**WPA / national-park**layered nature · heritage poster

field guide — **Field-guide / almanac**naturalist plate · specimen

psychedelic — **Psychedelic poster**60s-70s · melting type · vibrating color

roadside — **Roadside Americana**googie · souvenir kitsch

**Occult / tarot**Rider-Waite engraving · mystic

Full A3 catalog (now 43 values, expanded run-019) is organized into three sub-families: A3a design movements (Swiss · Bauhaus · Art Deco · Pop Art · Brutalism · Constructivism · Memphis · Minimalism · Maximalism · psychedelic · vaporwave…), A3b reference worlds (WPA · tiki · tarot · Kitsch · alpine-lodge · botanical · Western · diner · storybook · field-guide…), and A3c contemporary digital/UI (clean SaaS · editorial-minimal · soft-organic-modern · neo-brutalist-web · glassmorphism · gradient-mesh…). The ★ low-boldness entries (Minimalism · Bauhaus · clean-SaaS · editorial-minimal · soft-organic-modern · alpine-lodge · botanical) are the deliberately less-risky palette.

Posture — the brand's archetype / personality (code B8)

The third dimension. Posture is the stance behind the design — the brand archetype it plays. It's subtler than medium or world: it shifts tone and character, and it guides which medium, world, and boldness level even fit. Same brand + medium (silkscreen) below — only the personality changes:

**Caregiver**warm · gentle · neighbourly

**Explorer**rugged · adventurous · confident

The five archetypes (condensed from the classic brand-archetype set): Caregiver/Everyman · Explorer/Hero · Jester/Magician · Outlaw/Rebel · Sage/Creator. In the taxonomy posture is a strategy layer — it sets which medium/world/boldness are defensible — so, unlike medium and world, it doesn't go directly into the image prompt; here it's translated into visual cues so you can see its effect.

The honest caveats

The catalog now spans the full range — the run-019 A3 expansion added a contemporary-digital sub-family and a deliberate set of low-risk / refined directions. Key distinction: a chosen minimal/clean look (Minimalism · clean-SaaS · soft-organic-modern · editorial-minimal) is a real direction — not the AI-default bland we escape; anchor it with one ownable asset so it reads chosen, not generic.
A1 (medium) and A3 (world) aren't perfectly clean — some worlds imply a medium (Hatch-Show ⇒ letterpress; psychedelic ⇒ offset). When you sweep one, pin the other.
The boldness numbers attached to each medium/world are still estimates — only the boldness axes have been measured (below).

The map

Four systems + presets + strategy

8 axes · which world

Aesthetic

Medium, era/world, palette, atmosphere, lighting, focal subject, color-harmony, grain.

7 axes + 2 presets · how far

Boldness

Artifact density, ink coverage, composition risk, wordmark treatment, category-code stance, ornament. Plus the L1–L5 dial and the intensifier proxy.

11 axes · will it render

Structural-craft

Token order, hex precision, specimen-anchored fonts, font-tier safety, negatives, prompt length, no-seeds.

9 axes · the page

Mock-only

Section IA, layout variety, cross-section bleed, mid-page density, recurring character, framing, single-column, greeking.

Outside the grid: the L1–L5 dial and the intensifier adverb are presets over the boldness primitives (turn the dial or the primitives, not both). And B8 brand archetype is a strategy layer that sets which dial level is defensible — it never enters the prompt.

Aesthetic axes

Which world it lives in

Eight knobs that set identity. A1 and A3 are shown above; the rest:

Palette specification

steers both

Exact HEX + a spot-ink count, never colour words ("warm earthy" averages to safe neutral).

3 inks #2B6B47/#EE5530/#1A2A225-colour earthy7-chip neon clash

Atmosphere / scene-world

steers aesthetic

The hero subject & mood baked into the board.

Bigfoot in redwoodswood-fired-oven glowcosmic twilight

Lighting / illumination

steers aesthetic · added in review

How it's lit, independent of scene — carries a contrast/legibility consequence (keep bright elements out of the text band).

golden-hourlow-key noirbacklit silhouettedappled canopy

Focal subject / hierarchy

steers both · added in review

What the eye lands on first; single-hero reads boldest.

character-herofood-herotype-as-heroensemble

Color-harmony model

steers both · added in review

The relationship between hues (distinct from A5's exact hexes).

analogouscomplementary clashduotonemuted earth

A10

Surface grain / texture

steers boldness-lean · added in review

Generic texture not tied to a named press. "Clean / no texture" is itself a safe-tell.

paper toothheavy graindistress/wearvignette

Boldness axes · MEASURED

How far from safe — and which levers actually work

We swept five boldness axes one-at-a-time (50 images, content held fixed) and measured each. The finding: concrete nouns steer; abstract adverbs don't.

A2 · Medium artifacts VALIDATED — clean

The proof-of-medium nouns. Climbs cleanly and stays legible at every step — the validated primary boldness lever.

**+ misregistration**inks offset a few px

ink bleed — **+ halftone + ink-bleed**full printed signature

safe ——————————————▶ bold

B5 · The SAFE↔BOLD dial VALIDATED — composite

A preset that moves several primitives together — the widest safe→bold distance in the library.

**L1 conventional**clean, centered, friendly

**L3 distinctive**committed riso, treated wordmark

**L5 disruptive**punk-zine ransom collage

L1 ——————————————▶ L5

A4 · Ink drench ENTANGLED

Coverage pushes loudness, but past a point it costs legibility (drowns the type & swatches). Not a clean dial — split it into extent + a legibility guardrail.

B1 · Composition risk soft middle

Strong endpoints (centered → full-bleed crop), but the middle rungs are too close together to be distinct steps.

B7 · The bare intensifier adverb NULL — does not steer

"subtle → bold → extreme" with nothing concrete attached. Measured: Flash net −1.5, and a blind test recovered the order at chance (0.50) vs A2's 0.65. The word alone moves nothing — the model has nothing concrete to dial.

The one rule to take away

Name the medium and its physical artifacts (risograph + halftone + misregistration + ink-bleed); flood a feature band; break the grid. Those are concrete and they steer. "Make it bolder / more dramatic / edgy" is a confirmed dud — an abstract adverb gives the model nothing to dial. Other boldness axes: B2 wordmark treatment, B3 category-code stance, B4 ornament density, B6 targeted negatives.

How we read the numbers (measurement caveats)

The Flash judge is an ordinal direction signal only — a compressed scalar that conflates boldness with legibility/harmony. Treat its dips as harmony flags, not boldness reversals (unless the eye also sees flatness — as it did for B7).
No seeds → single images are noisy; judge a lever on the multi-sample trend, ideally blind to rung order.

Support systems

Make it land, and assemble the page

Structural-craft (will it render + build)

Axis	What it does
S1 order	medium-first, negatives last
S2 grain	artifact-NOUN beats style-LABEL
S3 framing	"a Style Tile", not "a brand board"
S4 font	specimen-anchored, SAFE-tier OR fixed SVG
S5 type-in-use	real headline + CTA, not a font label
S6 specimen	"matching an authentic <Font> specimen"
S7 negatives	reframe as positives; few & targeted
S8 length	<~400 words; verbose degrades font fidelity
S9 no-seeds	branch for direction; re-roll only defects
S10 body type	body face + pairing, SAFE-tier
S11 case	all-caps / sentence — declare in both prompt + HTML

Mock-only (the full-page layer)

Axis	What it does
M1 IA	the enumerated page spine
M2 variety	defeat the stacked-equal-band default
M3 bleed	an object crosses the section cut
M4 density	keep a feature band dense past the hero
M5 character	recurring mascot across sections
M6 frame	register-driven framing device
M7 column	held ON — fights the 2-column default
M8 greeking	held ON — "soft gray smudged lines"
M9 anti-chrome	held ON — no fake browser/URL bar

The font-tier coupling matters most here: a medium like letterpress/woodblock biases the baked letterform toward overflow-prone display type — down-spec to a SAFE slab or ship the logo as a fixed SVG.

Putting it together

Assembling a prompt

Set the dial once (it bundles the boldness primitives), then explicitly name the medium + 1–3 artifacts + exact palette + a SAFE-tier wordmark. Pick one world and one scene. That's the whole prompt — don't turn every boldness axis by hand, and don't over-describe.

A worked example (toolkit · risograph · L4)

A risograph brand Style Tile for REDWOOD PIZZERIA. Visible halftone, channel misregistration, soft grain. 3 spot inks #2B6B47 forest, #EE5530 red-orange, #1A2A22 ink on #F0EBDD newsprint. Wordmark REDWOOD PIZZERIA in Work Sans Black, matching an authentic Work Sans specimen, all caps, cream knockout with a hard red-orange misregistered offset. Type in use: headline 'PIZZA WORTH THE DRIVE' + a red-orange 'SEE THE MENU' pill. Bigfoot-in-redwoods vignette. Asymmetric, one element breaks its container. No clean vector, no symmetric swatch grid.

Every coloured fragment maps to an axis: medium (A1) · artifacts (A2) · palette (A5) · font (S4/S6) · treatment (B2) · composition (B1) · negatives (B6). Swap the medium and you get a different world; raise the artifacts/drench and you climb the dial.