Creative Strategist

Lock a brand's visual direction before any assets are generated, and encode it as a short, reusable style block — a fragment of prompt language that gets pasted into every downstream generation prompt. Prime rule: consistency beats beauty. Ten assets in one coherent style build a brand; ten gorgeous assets in ten styles build noise. The brief exists so that image prompts written weeks apart still produce siblings.

When to use / when not to

Use at the start of any creative engagement where more than one asset will be made, when generated assets "don't look like the same brand", or when the user can't articulate their aesthetic. Hand off instead when:

• The direction already exists (a real style guide or a prior brief) → go straight to skills/creative/image-generation or the specialist skills.
• The user needs the actual assets, not direction → after this brief, route via skills/creative/orchestrator or the specific asset skill.
• The question is product strategy ("who is this for?"), not visuals → skills/product-strategy/foundation-sprint first; its customer/differentiators feed this brief.

Intake

Ask in one batch, only what's missing:

1. Brand & offer — what is the product/company, in a sentence?
2. Audience — who must these visuals appeal to?
3. Existing constraints — logo, colors, fonts, or reference images already in use? (Ask for hex codes or links if they exist.)
4. Mood in 3 adjectives — how should someone feel seeing the brand?
5. Anti-examples — any brand or style they hate?

Infer, don't ask: industry conventions (fintech skews trustworthy/clean, D2C lifestyle skews warm/photographic); primary destinations from context (an e-commerce user needs product-photo direction more than illustration direction). Don't stall: with brand + audience known, propose the rest as labeled assumptions and proceed.

Workflow

1. Diagnose the aesthetic space. From intake, place the brand on the core spectrums: photorealistic ↔ illustrative, minimal ↔ maximal, warm ↔ cool, playful ↔ serious, mass ↔ premium. Note where competitors sit — matching them is a choice, not a default; flag one deliberate point of visual contrast.
2. Propose 3 distinct direction candidates. Each gets a name, a one-line vibe, a 3–5 color palette (with hex codes), lighting + composition defaults, and one sentence on why it fits the audience. Make them genuinely different directions (e.g. "Warm Editorial" vs "Clinical Minimal" vs "Bold Flat Illustration"), not shades of one idea. The user picks one; you may recommend, with a one-line reason.
3. Lock the aesthetic profile. Fill every field of the profile in the output format below. No field may read "flexible" or "depends" — a value the user can overrule later beats a blank.
4. Write the style block. Compress the profile into 1–3 lines of literal prompt language, e.g.: photorealistic, warm golden-hour lighting, rule-of-thirds composition, warm gold (#C9A227) and cream (#F5EFE0) palette, approachable premium mood, highly detailed, professional photography Test it mentally against three different asset types (product shot, social graphic, illustration) — if it only works for one, generalize the wording and move medium-specific details into the per-medium adaptations.
5. Set prohibitions and consistency rules. 3–7 concrete "never" rules (e.g. "never neon colors", "no stock-photo handshake clichés", "no more than two typefaces") and the rule for when secondary style variants may be used.
6. (Optional) Validate with a test generation. If FAL_API_KEY is set, generate one probe image per finalist direction so the user picks from pixels, not adjectives: python docs/creative_cli.py custom --category style-tests --name <direction-slug> --prompt "<representative subject>, <style block>" --resolution 1K (Full automation reference: skills/creative/image-generation/references/automation.md.)

Required output format

Deliver exactly this brief (markdown, concise):

# Creative Direction Brief — [brand]

## Chosen direction: [name] (rejected: [alt 1], [alt 2] — one-line why)

## Aesthetic profile
| Field | Value |
| Primary style | photorealistic / illustrative / minimal / abstract / mixed: ... |
| Color palette | [name #hex] x 3–5, with roles (primary / secondary / accent) |
| Mood | [3 adjectives] |
| Lighting default | [e.g. soft studio, natural golden hour, dramatic rim] |
| Composition default | [e.g. centered + negative space, rule of thirds] |
| Detail level | minimal / moderate / high |
| Audience | [who this must appeal to] |
| Deliberate contrast | [the one way we look different from the category] |

## Style block (paste into every image prompt)
> [1–3 lines of literal prompt language]

## Per-medium adaptations
- Product photography: [what changes — background, lighting]
- Social graphics: [what changes — contrast, text space]
- Brand assets / illustration: [what changes — flatness, line weight]

## Prohibitions
1. Never ...
2. Never ...

## Consistency rule
Every prompt for this brand includes the style block verbatim; deviations are
proposed to the user first, never improvised.

Quality bar

• User chose from 3 genuinely distinct directions (or explicitly skipped the choice)
• Every palette color has a hex code and a role
• Style block is literal prompt language — paste-ready, no meta-instructions like "use brand colors"
• Style block works for at least three asset types via the per-medium adaptations
• Prohibitions are concrete and checkable, not "avoid bad design"
• No invented market claims about what "converts better" — label taste as taste, heuristics as heuristics

Hard don'ts: never deliver a brief with TBD fields; never let the user pick "all three directions"; never restyle mid-project without updating this brief first.

Integration

• skills/product-strategy/foundation-sprint → upstream; its target customer and differentiators become this brief's audience and deliberate contrast.
• skills/creative/image-generation → consumes the style block in every prompt spec's style/lighting/mood fields.
• skills/creative/product-photography, skills/creative/social-graphics, skills/creative/brand-asset → consume the style block plus their per-medium adaptation line.
• skills/creative/orchestrator → runs this skill first on any multi-asset path where no brief exists; the brief is the artifact passed forward.