# Visual Cues Pipeline Loaded by `{{command_prefix}}impeccable document` seed mode (Step 4) when image generation is available. Input: the five seed interview answers, the asset observations from seed Step 2, and PRODUCT.md. Output: cue images plus `cues.json` under `.impeccable/visual-cues/`, ready for the user to pick from by eye in a later round. Tell the user once, before starting: *"Generating visual cues; this can take a few minutes."* Then work without narration. Chat carries no per-image commentary, no palette tables, no prompt dumps; the folder is the deliverable. ## The two images Each cue is **two generations by the same agent**, in sequence: ```text HERO [slug].png (1500x1500) ARTIFACT SHEET masters/[slug]-artifacts.png +---------------------------+ +-------------+-------------+ 1500x1500 | | | [obj A] | [obj B] | | one full-bleed scene, | | centered, | centered, | | the product's world, | | ~2/3 of | clear | | all four artifact | | its cell | margins | | objects visible in it, | +-------------+-------------+ 750 | four palette colors | | [obj C] | [obj D] | | with named carriers | | | | | | | flat cream #FDFCF6 across | +---------------------------+ | the whole canvas, no cell | saved as-is, NO crop | borders, soft shadows OK | +-------------+-------------+ quadrant-cropped into [slug]-2..5.png, NO matting ``` - The **hero** is the visual cue: one atmospheric full-bleed composition that stages the concept's palette and mood; this is what the user will pick between. No grid, no regions: the whole frame is the scene. The four artifact objects all appear inside it. - The **artifact sheet** is the second generation, with the hero attached as the reference image: the same four objects re-photographed individually, one per quadrant, each isolated and centered on one continuous flat warm-cream background, `#FDFCF6`. The objects inherit the hero's materials and colors; only the setting changes. ("Sheet" is our name for the file; the prompt never uses it.) - **No transparency, ever.** No alpha channels, no chroma keys, no "transparent background" in any prompt (image models paint a checkerboard instead). Crops keep the cream; soft contact shadows are welcome, they ground the objects. - **Isolation is a hard rule on the sheet.** Every object centered on its quadrant's center point, filling about two-thirds of it, with clear cream margin on every side: nothing comes near the canvas edge, another object, or the quadrant midlines. The crop cuts exactly at the midlines, so anything crossing one gets clipped. Example, hero = a flower atelier's worktable: sheet quadrants carry the wrapping ribbon, a single stem, a row of loose petals, and the ceramic vase. All four are visible in the hero scene. ## The studio Palettes come from **six competing specialists**, not from you. One mind composing six palettes converges on one taste, and six versions of one mood defeat the pick round. Each specialist is a subagent locked to a **persona**: a different method of searching color space (object association, cultural reframing, remote analogy, self-imposed constraint, audience perspective-taking, emotional sequencing). Same brief, same output format, different search method; the separation is what makes the six palettes genuinely different. The studio runs two phases, staffed differently on purpose: personas are hired for brand thinking, image specialists for prompt craft; one agent doing both does neither at full strength. 1. **The palette chain** (Step 2): the six personas compose in sequence, each shown the color territories already claimed and required to take a new one. 2. **The image wave** (Step 3): six image specialists, one per palette, in parallel; each drafts the concept, builds both prompts, and generates the two images. Subagents start without your context, so every spawn task is self-contained: it carries the brief packet, the persona or palette, and every rule the subagent needs. Paste the shared blocks below into tasks **verbatim**; a summarized rule is a dropped rule. ## Step 1: Assemble the brief packet Write one self-contained text block that a specialist with zero context can design from. Include, in full: - **The product**: from PRODUCT.md, what it is, sells, or shows; the audience; the positioning; the personality words. - **The interview**: Q1 color strategy and hue anchor, Q2 type direction, Q4 the three named references, Q5 the anti-reference. State that the anti-reference is a hard constraint on every palette. - **The assets**: the seed Step 2 observations (logo colors, recurring materials, photo moods). Label it `BRIEF PACKET` and reuse the same block verbatim in every spawn of both phases; a packet that drifts between spawns invalidates the comparison. Do **not** add your own palette leanings to it: the personas do the leaning. ## The six personas The number is the persona's **position in the chain**: it composes after everyone with a lower number, and their territories are off-limits to it. 1. **The Ecological Naturalist**: derive every color from real materials, organisms, weather, or landscapes in the product's world. Name the physical source of each hex. No abstract "brand blue" thinking; the palette must feel materially plausible, textural, grounded. 2. **The Cross-Cultural Anthropologist**: treat color as cultural meaning. Compare at least two cultural lenses relevant to this audience, find where the meanings align and where they diverge, and turn that tension into the palette. Do not stereotype or flatten into cliché. 3. **The Analogy Hacker**: never start from the product category. Choose one distant domain (a jazz progression, a thermal camera, a medieval manuscript, a subway map, a laboratory stain chart) and translate its structure into color logic. The palette should never emerge from category convention, yet feel coherent once explained. 4. **The Constraint Poet**: before composing, invent three to five severe but fruitful constraints ("one accent only", "every color must survive dusk", "mineral tones plus one synthetic intruder"), then compose the strongest palette inside them. Do not relax the rules; tension is the point. 5. **The Audience Empath**: design from the audience's exact emotional and cognitive state at their first critical encounter with the product: what they need to feel, notice, and trust in that moment. The brand's ego does not vote. 6. **The Emotion Dramaturge**: build the palette as an emotional arc, not a static board. Define the felt sequence of using this product (invitation, curiosity, tension, confidence, release) and assign hue, lightness, and saturation to its beats. Accessibility and implementation stay **out** of the personas: the PALETTE RULES block carries the contrast requirements for everyone. A persona whose identity is "the contrast checker" composes cautious mud. ## Shared blocks Paste these into spawn tasks where the templates call for them. They are the single source of the craft rules; never restate them loosely. ### PALETTE RULES ```text Compose exactly four hex values with a 60-30-10 balance. These are website/app colors, headed for design tokens, not scene colors: - neutral (~60%, the dominant): the surface, what most of a screen will be. An off-white or near-white with a temperature tint, or a near-black when the mood calls for dark. Never pure #FFFFFF or #000000. - primary (~30%): the brand color, the mood's main carrier. Must read clearly against the neutral. - secondary: structure and support: an adjacent hue, or the primary shifted in lightness and chroma. Visibly a different swatch, not a darker copy of primary. - tertiary (~10%, the accent): the most saturated of the four and used smallest; distinct in hue from primary so it keeps signal value. Hard rules: - Write one mood phrase specific enough to compose from. Good: "dawn delivery run, cut stems in cold water, the city still gray". Bad: "modern and clean"; a phrase that fits any brand composes nothing. - Every color earns its place: for each role, one line on what it does and why it fits this product. A color you cannot justify in one line gets replaced, not kept because it looks nice. - Contrast is non-negotiable: primary must read clearly on the neutral; tertiary must pop against both. A palette that fails either is not done. - Any two roles must be nameable apart at a glance. A dark green primary next to a dark green neutral is one color, not two. - The brief's anti-reference is a hard constraint. ``` ### CONCEPT RULES ```text Attach one one-line cue concept to the palette; the hero image stages it. - The concept lives in the product's own world, named with the brief's own nouns. A concept that could belong to any other product is not done; sharpen it until it could only be this brand. - Give it a material world (botanical, ceramic, paper, textile, metal, glass, stone, food) as the supporting cast around the product's subject, never a replacement for it. - Name four artifact objects, each passing three tests: chosen from inside the scene, so it plausibly sits in the hero composition; compact, so it sits centered in a square-ish quadrant (no edge-to-edge ladles or full-width garlands); carrying no writing (no tags, labels, packaging, printed cards, or stationery), because text on an artifact ruins it. - Name the concept with a two-word slug (amber-dusk, coastal-glass). ``` ### HERO PROMPT skeleton Written like screenplay direction, not a keyword list: subject doing something, in a place, in a light. Every palette color is named twice, as a plain-language color and as its hex, and tied to a physical carrier in the scene; a hex with no carrier gets ignored. Fill every `[bracketed]` slot; never leave template language in the prompt. ```text One full-bleed photograph, 1500x1500 pixels: [one atmospheric scene from the product's world: subject and what it is doing, setting, time of day]. The scene contains [artifact A], [artifact B], [artifact C], and [artifact D], all plainly visible. Lighting: [direction and quality, e.g. "low afternoon window light raking in from the left"]. Camera: [framing and lens, e.g. "85mm still life at waist level, shallow depth of field"]. Mood: [two or three adjectives from the brief's personality]. The scene is art-directed to a strict four-color story, every color plainly visible: [color name] ([neutral hex]) as the dominant ground and backdrop, about 60% of the frame; [color name] ([primary hex]) carried by [the main subject]; [color name] ([secondary hex]) on [a supporting element]; [color name] ([tertiary hex]) as one small vivid accent on [a specific object]. Rich, saturated, editorial color. Photorealistic, real texture. No text, no labels, no numbers, no borders, no watermark. ``` ### SHEET PROMPT skeleton Runs as the **second** generation with the hero attached as the reference/input image, so the objects match the scene instead of being reinvented. It describes plain product photography; any word that implies an editorial layout ("catalog", "sheet", "spread", "grid") invites the model to design a page with titles and captions. The cream is constant across all cues (`#FDFCF6`; the artifacts land on this exact surface downstream); never restyle it per concept. ```text Using the attached photograph as the exact reference for objects, materials, and colors: one square photograph, 1500x1500 pixels, of four objects from that scene, each re-photographed individually from directly overhead in soft even studio light. This is a plain photograph of objects resting on a bare surface. Absolutely no text anywhere in the image: no letters, no words, no numbers, no labels, no captions, no title. The surface is one perfectly flat warm-cream background, hex #FDFCF6, continuous edge to edge. Picture the canvas divided into four equal quadrants: [artifact A] top-left, [artifact B] top-right, [artifact C] bottom-left, [artifact D] bottom-right. Each object sits exactly centered on its quadrant's center point, filling about two-thirds of its quadrant, with clear cream margin on every side: nothing comes anywhere near the canvas edges or the horizontal and vertical centerlines of the image. A soft gentle contact shadow under each object is welcome. No frames, no cell borders, no dividing lines, no watermark, no typography of any kind; the background stays one uninterrupted #FDFCF6 everywhere. ``` ## Step 2: The palette chain (sequential) Spawn the personas **one at a time in numbered order**, collecting each reply before spawning the next: every palette that exists when a persona composes goes into its task as claimed territory. The chain is the uniqueness mechanism, each persona diverging from all the work before it, so run it sequentially even though a subagent tool could parallelize it. (No subagent tool at all: Step 4.) Task template: ```text You are a color specialist composing one brand palette. Reply in chat only; do not edit repo files. PERSONA: [the persona's full numbered entry from The six personas] [the BRIEF PACKET, verbatim] [the PALETTE RULES block, verbatim] Color territories already claimed by the specialists before you: [one line per earlier persona: "[N]: [mood phrase] / primary #RRGGBB, secondary #RRGGBB, tertiary #RRGGBB, neutral #RRGGBB"; for persona 1 write "none, you compose first"] Claimed territory is off-limits: your palette must read as a different color story, with a primary in a different hue family and a mood no earlier specialist used. Do not repeat or lightly shift their work. Design ONE palette in your persona's method. Reply with exactly this format and nothing else: MOOD [your mood phrase] primary=#RRGGBB [one-line reason] secondary=#RRGGBB [one-line reason] tertiary=#RRGGBB [one-line reason] neutral=#RRGGBB [one-line reason] ``` Close each agent after collecting its reply. If a reply lands in an already-claimed hue family anyway, re-spawn that persona once with the colliding palette added to the claimed list and a line naming the collision; keep the second answer regardless. Done when: six palettes exist, one per persona, each with a mood and four hexes, and no two primaries share a hue family. ## Step 3: The image wave (parallel) If the harness has any subagent/spawn tool, parallel is **required** here: emit all six spawns in one tool-call batch, one palette per subagent. **Never generate the images yourself one at a time when a subagent tool exists**; a serial loop in a subagent-capable harness is a failure, not a fallback. Attach the harness's image-generation skill to each spawn when the harness expects that (Codex: the `imagegen` skill). The image specialist is **not a persona**: it is hired for prompt craft, staging a finished palette with exact color fidelity. Task template: ```text You are an image-generation specialist: expert at turning a brand palette and mood into art-directed photographic prompts and images with exact color fidelity. Use the harness's native image generation tool; do not fall back to CLIs or APIs; do not edit repo files. [the BRIEF PACKET, verbatim] The palette you are staging: [the persona's mood + palette + reasons] 1. Draft the concept for the palette: [the CONCEPT RULES block, verbatim] 2. Build the hero prompt from this skeleton and generate the HERO image, 1500x1500 (or the nearest supported square): [the HERO PROMPT skeleton, with its fill rules] 3. Build the sheet prompt from this skeleton and generate the ARTIFACT SHEET, same size, passing the hero you just generated as the reference/input image (the tool's image-edit or reference-image mode): [the SHEET PROMPT skeleton, with its notes] 4. Look at the sheet you generated. If any object crosses the canvas edge or the horizontal or vertical centerline, or any text appears anywhere, regenerate the ARTIFACT SHEET once: same reference image, same prompt, plus this line appended: "Make every object smaller, at most half of its quadrant, pulled in tight to its quadrant's center, with even more empty cream between the objects and around the edges." Never retry more than once; keep the second sheet regardless. 5. Reply with exactly these four lines and nothing else: COMPLETED [slug] HERO [absolute path to the hero PNG] ARTIFACTS [absolute path to the final sheet PNG] PALETTE primary=#RRGGBB;secondary=#RRGGBB;tertiary=#RRGGBB;neutral=#RRGGBB If either generation fails, reply instead with one line: ERROR [palette number] [short reason] ``` Six spawns fit the observed Codex ceiling of 6 concurrent subagents, so the wave normally runs whole. If a spawn is rejected with a thread-limit error, collect the accepted spawns, close those agents to release their slots, then run a second pass for the rejects. If every spawn ERRORs because subagents lack the image tool, fall back to Step 4's generation loop using the chain's palettes you already hold. Close every agent after collecting its report. If two reports share a slug, rename one before Step 5 (the crop `--slug` flag controls the filenames). Done when: every palette has either a four-line COMPLETED report or an ERROR line. An ERROR palette is dropped, not retried more than once; five good cues beat a stalled pipeline. ## Step 4: Serial path (no subagents) Only when the harness has no subagent tool at all: run the studio yourself at **4** palettes, playing personas 1-4 in chain order, one at a time and honestly in-method (the Naturalist names physical sources; the Constraint Poet writes its constraints before composing), holding each later persona to the earlier territories exactly as the chain task does. Then generate each pair yourself, one palette at a time, following the Step 3 task from its step 1 (concept, hero, sheet, look-and-retry) and recording the same four facts a subagent would report (slug, both paths, final palette). Same done-condition as Step 3, over 4 palettes. ## Step 5: Crop and compile For each COMPLETED report, run one command, carrying the report's slug and its `PALETTE` line: ```text node {{scripts_path}}/visual-cues.mjs crop [hero.png] [artifacts.png] \ --slug [slug] \ --palette "primary=#RRGGBB;secondary=#RRGGBB;tertiary=#RRGGBB;neutral=#RRGGBB" \ --out .impeccable/visual-cues ``` The script copies the hero untouched to `[slug].png`, keeps the sheet under `masters/[slug]-artifacts.png`, and quadrant-crops the sheet into `[slug]-2.png` through `[slug]-5.png` (cream stays; nothing is matted). For each palette role it searches the hero for the closest rendered pixel (`snapped`, with its hero position), then updates `cues.json`: ```json { "cues": ["amber-dusk", "coastal-glass"], "supporting-artifacts": { "amber-dusk": ["amber-dusk-2", "amber-dusk-3", "amber-dusk-4", "amber-dusk-5"] }, "palette": { "amber-dusk": { "primary": { "hex": "#B8422E", "snapped": "#B4402F", "at": [312, 540] } } } } ``` Done when: `cues.json` lists one entry per completed palette and every listed slug has its five PNGs on disk (hero plus four artifacts). ## Step 6: Pause Tell the user in one or two lines that the visual cues are ready at `.impeccable/visual-cues/` (name the count), then end your turn. The pick round is a separate later step: do not show or describe the images, do not ask which the user prefers, and do not write DESIGN.md in this turn.