NCAD AI for Artists Workshop · Week 02

Prompting Like an Art Director

Briefs, References, and Critique Loops

Returning students sit anywhere; new students get the 5-min recap next slide.

Recap + callback

"The model didn't fail. The brief did."

Today we turn that sentence into a repeatable skill.

5-min integrity recap for drop-ins: friction vs meaning, raw output isn't finished work, disclosure, verification, skepticism-when-specific.

Today

Today's promise

A briefing system you'll reuse all term:

A real brief for a real project of yours
A rubric that makes any AI — or classmate — give you useful criticism instead of compliments

Both artifacts feed every later week + the capstone. Say so.

Deliverable

You will leave with

One AI-ready creative brief — your project

One track critique rubric — 6 lines that bite

Show the templates exist: creative-brief-template.md, critique-rubric-template.md.

First

Kill the myth

There are no magic words.

"Prompt engineering" for creative work =
90% classic creative-brief discipline + 10% machine quirks

"You're in art school. You're closer to expert at this than the tech bros are."

Today's map

Anatomy of a brief — 40 min
Demo: one brief, six tracks — 45 min
Lab: surgery → your brief → your rubric — 70 min
Share, critique, reflect — 45 min

Breaks protected, as always.

Part 1

The anatomy of a brief that works

The 8 parts go on the board as a column; they stay up all day.

Anatomy

Eight parts, eight failure modes

Role · Context · Constraints · References
Avoid · Output format · Criteria · The decision line

Remove any one → a specific, predictable kind of bad output.

Teaching move: for each part ask "what happens without it?" BEFORE revealing. They can derive most from Week 1 memory.

Anatomy 1/8

Role

"Act as a practical creative director for motion design."

Without it: generic assistant voice, generic standards.

Role sets the bar the model aims at. "Practical" is doing work in that sentence — it suppresses fluff.

Anatomy 2/8

Context

Project, audience, where the work lives.

Without it: the model invents a default context. The default is wrong.

"Narrow audience beats broad: 'Dublin gig-goers who already like synth music' outperforms 'everyone' every time."

Anatomy 3/8

Constraints

Format, palette, duration, budget, the non-negotiables.

Without them: you get the average of the internet.

Full constraints section coming — this is the headline.

Anatomy 4/8

References

The qualities you want — described precisely, or shown.

Without them: "style" collapses into cliché.

The consent line gets its own slide shortly.

Anatomy 5/8

The avoid list

What you explicitly don't want.

Without it: the clichés walk right in wearing lanyards.

Cheapest upgrade in prompting. "No neon, no rain, no hooded figures" does visible work.

Anatomy 6/8

Output format

"Five directions, each: one-line concept, layout in words, one risk."

Without it: one long, confident essay.

Output shape keeps the model from deciding for you — "directions + risks" forces options open.

Anatomy 7/8

Criteria

How drafts will be judged — written into the brief.

Without them: you can't critique what has no standard. Neither can the model.

These become the rubric in the lab. Plant the seed now.

Anatomy 8/8

The decision line

"Don't pick a winner — that's my job."

Without it: the model decides. You rubber-stamp.

"Eight words that keep you the director. Make them a habit."

Reality check

Do you need all eight every time?

No. Quick tasks: role + ask.

But when output disappoints, the diagnosis is always:
"Which organ is missing?"

That's the lab.

Frames Prompt Surgery before lunch-brain forgets.

Part 1, continued

Constraints are creative direction

The counterintuitive section. ~0:30.

Recall

Remember the average machine

Unconstrained model → the mean of everything online.
By design. Not fixable with politeness.

Callback to Week 1 — returning students nod, new students catch up.

Compare

Loose vs. tight

"Poster, any style"

The global average
Nothing to judge against
Model's defaults win

"2-colour riso, type-led, reads at 5m + phone story"

A specific corner
Pass/fail-able
Your direction wins

Corners are where interesting work lives.

"You already know this: 'anything you like' is the hardest client sentence in the world."

Watch out

Constraints it can't satisfy

Exact word counts · arithmetic · pixel-precise layout
→ confidently ignored.

Constrain direction. Verify compliance yourself.

"Ask it to 'list my constraints back before answering' — catches drift early."

Part 1, continued

References: show, don't just tell

~0:38.

References

Three levels

Telling: "1970s print feeling" — okay
Telling precisely: "flat colour, heavy grain, slight misregistration, like a 1970s riso gig poster" — much better
Showing: paste 1–3 examples of what good looks like — fastest taste transfer

Level 2 vocabulary: materials, light, colour behaviour, texture, type feeling. Level 3 = "few-shot."

Course rule

References

The consent line

We do not prompt with living artists' names.

✓ Qualities: "Bauhaus poster geometry"
✗ Signature theft: "in the style of [working illustrator]"

Deliver carefully: consent fight centre + professionally radioactive + community trust. "This appears in every integrity check this term."

The craft argument

Why qualities beat names (besides ethics)

Naming qualities forces you to understand
why you like the reference.

That understanding works on every brief, every tool, every collaborator, forever.

The craft argument lands with students the ethics argument doesn't reach. Use both.

Part 1, finale

The critique loop

Your hostile reviewer on demand

~0:44. "Highest-value prompting skill. Needs zero generation."

Critique loops

Without criteria: compliments

The model is trained to be liked.
The word is sycophancy.

"This is a strong concept with great potential!" — about everything.

Have a real saccharine example ready from prep. The room laughs, then gets it.

Critique loops

With your rubric: a second pair of eyes

Work + your criteria + "be specific" + you decide

= competent criticism at 2am before the deadline

"The model doesn't replace crit. It makes you arrive at crit with the obvious problems already fixed."

Critique loops

The loop, four steps

Give it the work (text or screenshot)
Give it your criteria (from your brief)
Demand: the weakness, why it matters for this audience, one concrete fix
You decide what to accept — filtering critique is taste training

Step 4 is the integrity step. Accepting everything = outsourcing taste.

Try this now

90 seconds

The anti-sycophancy clause

Do not compliment me. Do not soften. If the work is generic, say where and why. Give me the review a tired, skeptical creative director would give at 6pm on a Friday.

Students paste it onto anything they have. The tone change is immediate and memorable.

Habits

Iteration etiquette

React with specifics, not "make it better"
One variable at a time when close; start over when not
Fresh chats for fresh directions
Three failed revisions = the brief has a hole
Briefs live in docs, never only in chats

Five habits, one slide. The handout repeats them.

Break

Break — 10 minutes

Demo staged before you walk away: base brief in paste buffer.

Demo

One brief, six tracks

~1:00. Prompts from DEMOS_AND_VISUAL_AIDS.md Week 02.

Demo

The base

The base brief

Week 1's degree-show poster brief.
Audience: Dublin creative industry + families. Tone: confident, not corporate.

Watch what survives translation — and what must change.

Paste the universal-vs-specific prompt first; its two-column answer structures the whole demo.

Demo

The pattern

The spine vs. the moving parts

Never changes

Audience · Goal · Tone

Changes per discipline

Deliverable specs · Constraints · References · Critique criteria

Keep score on the board as adaptations run. The pattern teaches itself by the third track.

Demo · live

Adaptation 1

Motion design

15-second Instagram story version:
specs, timing, type-in-motion constraints, sound note, motion references

Run live. Ask after: "What changed? What survived?"

Demo · live

Adaptation 2

UX

Degree-show website:
wayfinding, accessibility, mobile-first, performance constraints

Run live. This one usually smuggles the riso colours in — don't point it out yet.

Demo · live

Adaptation 3

3D

Physical signage / installation:
materials, sightlines, fabrication constraints, budget reality

Run live. Illustration/graphic/animation versions shown from demos/week-02 prepared page.

Planned failure

Demo

Find the smuggled constraint

One adaptation kept a rule that makes no sense in its medium.

Catching that is your job. Every time. Every tool.

Let the room hunt. If the model didn't oblige today, show the prep screenshot where it did.

Demo

The closing move

From brief to rubric

Build me a 6-line critique rubric. Each line: one pass/fail question tied to a SPECIFIC constraint in this brief. No generic design-school questions.

Then: reject any line that could apply to any project.

Reject at least one line live and make it regenerate. The rejection is the teachable moment.

Your turn

5 minutes

Adapt your brief

"Rewrite my brief for [your track] producing [your deliverable]. Change only what must change. Highlight what you changed."

Circulate. Listen for "huh, it kept the wrong constraint" — celebrate every catch aloud.

Break

Break — 10 minutes

Lab next: surgery, then your own brief + rubric.

Stage the three bad prompts slide.

Lab · 70 minutes

Surgery → Brief → Rubric

A. Prompt surgery, teams — 25 min · B. Your brief — 25 min · C. Your rubric — 20 min

Parts + times on the board.

Lab A · 25 min

Teams of 2–3

The patients

"Design me a logo for my brand. Make it modern and clean."
"Write something for my portfolio about my project."
"Give me ideas for my animation."

All three are real student prompts in spirit.

Lab A

The discipline

Predict first

Predict what's wrong before running (anatomy table)
Run it. Were you right?
Fix the two weakest organs only
Re-run. Save before/after for share-out

Enforce predict-first hard. Teams fixing everything at once: "Two organs. Which two?"

Lab B · 25 min

Solo

Your brief, your ✏️ marks

Full skeleton, real current project. Run. One surgery pass.

Mark ✏️ every line only you could have written — audience knowledge, taste, constraints.

The ✏️ marks are authorship evidence. No project? Imaginary band/show/app — but push for real.

Lab C · 20 min

Solo

Your rubric must bite

Six lines from YOUR brief's constraints.

Test on Part B's output: at least two lines must fail.
All passing? Sharpen the rubric, not your feelings.

"A rubric that everything passes is a greeting card."

Always available

Alternative

Zero-generation track

A: diagnose the three prompts on paper — predict, don't run
B + C: brief and rubric are writing tasks — the actual deliverable

Model as critic only, or not at all. Equal credit.

Offer neutrally to everyone.

Share-out · 35 min

Show the work

Teams: one surgery before/after — room names which organ did the work
Solos: read your best ✏️ line
Rubrics: one line that made the output fail

Applaud specificity. Ask of rubric lines: "Would that also improve a human crit?" Yes — say so.

Every week

Integrity check

This week's four

Whose taste is in the brief?
References: qualities — or a living artist in a trench coat?
Portfolio work from this brief → disclosure starts now
Classmate's project or client material in a prompt? Permission first

Same four-beat rhythm as every week.

Reflection

Write 4 lines

The brief-part that most improved output today
One thing your rubric caught that you'd have missed
One line of your brief only you could have written
Where your brief library lives (decide now)

Two quiet minutes. Brief + rubric get reused every week from here.

Next Wednesday

Research, Moodboards, and Concept Development Without Copying

Your briefing skill, aimed at the research phase — plus the verification habits that keep AI research honest.

Tease: "We'll watch AI invent a very convincing artist who has never existed."

Tonight, optional

Go deeper

Anthropic — Prompting 101 (embedded on the week page)
Anthropic interactive prompt tutorial (free, hands-on)
The Futur — brief-writing for client work
Set up your custom instructions / Project system prompt

Final slide stays up while people pack.