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Putting "make it feel right" into words
Whether it's a client or a prompt box, you end up explaining style in words. A way of breaking style into six layers.
Translated from the Korean original. Read in Korean
"Can you make it feel a bit more… right?"
The first time I heard that, I sighed inwardly. Feel? Which feeling?
Over time I realized the person who said it hadn't done anything wrong. Not many people have practiced putting the image in their head into words. The problem was that I, the designer, hadn't practiced either. Apart from asking back, "What kind of feeling do you want?", I had nothing. And then the meeting runs two hours and goes nowhere.
These days there's one more listener. We give instructions to tools in words now. Writing a prompt is surprisingly similar to talking with a client. It's a moment when practice at breaking style into words turns directly into skill.
"Let's go with a Bauhaus feel"
Style names are convenient. They're also dangerous.
Hear the same word, "Bauhaus", and one person pictures red, yellow and blue geometric shapes while another pictures gray sans-serifs on a grid. Neither is wrong. A style name crams decades of work into one word, so its resolution is bound to be low.
So I use the name only as a starting point and break it down from there. I usually split it into six layers.
Six layers
The first is era and movement. Art Deco, Swiss Style, Memphis, Y2K. What matters more than the name is what the movement was reacting against. Swiss Style chose the grid to strip away ornament; Memphis burst out because that ascetic attitude had grown tiresome. Knowing the context shows you how far you can push. There's a chronological list in the Style Guide.
The second is form. Geometric or organic, sharp corners or rounded, thick lines or thin. Clients pick up this layer quickly. "Angular feels solid; rounded feels friendly." Pairing a form with the impression it gives moves the conversation forward.
The third is color, and ending at "blue" is the same as saying nothing. You need to say whether saturation is high or low, whether the lightness gap between background and text is large, and how few colors it holds on with. Even a buzzword like "dopamine colors" has to be translated into saturation and number of colors before hands can move.
The fourth is texture and medium. The one most often left out, and the one with the biggest effect. Risograph, silkscreen, newspaper halftone dots, slightly misregistered printing, the rough tone of something photocopied a few times over, film grain. The same shape becomes a completely different object depending on what it was printed with.
The fifth is composition and gaze. Centered or asymmetric, a visible grid or a hidden one, white space used as structure or left over as empty room. If photos are involved, camera height and light direction belong to this layer too.
The last is mood. Neat, messy, dry, expensive, cheap-looking. Start a conversation with these adjectives and you get "make it feel right". Add them after the other five layers are settled and they become fine-tuning. Order is everything.
Talking to people
If you've brought up a name, put three images on screen right then. "Which of these is it?" Trade only words and you'll think you agreed while each of you was picturing something different. That one question saves an hour of meeting.
Ask what they dislike, too. People struggle to say what they want, but everyone is clear about what they don't. No gradients, or no handwritten fonts. Get just three lines of don'ts and the drafts won't miss by much.
Talking to machines
Prompts use the same six layers. Machines just understand a little differently from people.
Medium names beat adjectives. "1970s offset print, ink bleed" comes out far more precisely than "vintage". Negatives don't work well. Write "no text" and text still shows up. Better to say what should go there instead than what to leave out.
Put five things in one sentence and three get reflected. Lead with what matters, then add the rest one layer at a time as you look at the results.
Adding a living artist's name gets you there fast. But lifting that style wholesale for commercial work is another matter. I feel better describing it with movement and medium names instead.
Where you get stuck is usually not taste but vocabulary.
In the end, it's the number of words
The ability to put things into words is proportional to how many words you know. If you don't know risograph, you can't ask for a riso feel; if you don't know misregistration, you can't use that offset on purpose.
So lately I've been consciously memorizing style names and print terms bit by bit. Once about thirty of the common ones were second nature, meetings got noticeably shorter. When an unfamiliar word comes up, I keep the Glossary open.
Now when I hear "make it feel right", a question comes out before the sigh. Looking back, that was the biggest change.