A lack of shared visual vocabulary causes AI-generated visuals to diverge from a designer's intended vision. Designers often use vague mood terms like 'clean' or 'dreamy', but AI requires clarity and responds to explicit style names. Design styles encompass culture, history, materials, mood, and form, creating identifiable ecosystems defined by color, typography, and layout. Learning these styles sharpens visual trend recognition, enables more effective AI prompting, and allows precise briefs for collaborators. A curated visual design vocabulary with descriptions, core elements, and usage contexts speeds creation, improves communication, and supports ideation, branding, and AI-assisted workflows.
The problem wasn't the AI. It was the lack of a shared visual vocabulary. As designers, we often talk about color, layout, or typography and we generally think or imagine in moods for instance "clean," "dreamy," "grunge" , but AI doesn't understand ambiguity. What it needs is clarity. What it understands is style names. Design styles are more than just aesthetic categories.
Lately, I found myself stuck in a weird way. Not because I lacked ideas, but because AI didn't seem to understand what I meant. That's when I started to learn about design styles and thought to document it that I now call a visual design vocabulary. It's a reference guide of styles that helps me write better prompts, create faster, and communicate more clearly. Not just with AI, but with clients, and other designers.
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