pbakaus_impeccable/skill/reference/visual-cues.md

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 minute or two." Then work without narration. Chat carries no per-image commentary, no palette tables, no prompt dumps; the folder is the deliverable.

The images

Each cue is three generations by the same agent, in sequence: the hero, then the artifact sheet rendered twice, once on cream and once on black. The parent fuses the two sheet passes into one transparent-background sheet before cropping.

HERO  [slug].png (1500x1500)            ARTIFACT SHEET, two passes (1500x1500)
+---------------------------+           +-------------+-------------+
|                           |           |   [obj A]   |   [obj B]   |  pass 1:
|   one close-framed scene, |           |  centered,  |  centered,  |  cream
|   the product's world,    |           |  ~2/3 of    |  clear      |  #FDFCF6
|   all four artifact       |           |  its cell   |  margins    |
|   objects visible in it,  |           +-------------+-------------+
|   four palette colors     |           pass 2: the SAME image, edit mode,
|   as large color fields   |           background swapped to pure black
|                           |
+---------------------------+           parent: matte pass1 + pass2 ->
     saved as-is, NO crop               true-alpha RGBA sheet, quadrant-
                                        cropped into [slug]-2..5.png
                                        (transparent-background PNGs)

• The hero is the visual cue: one tightly framed full-bleed composition that stages the concept's palette in large color fields; this is what the user will pick between, so every palette color gets real estate. No grid, no regions: the whole frame is the scene. The four artifact objects all appear inside it. The hero stays fully opaque.
• 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.)
• The dark pass is the third generation, with the cream sheet attached as the reference image: the identical sheet with only the background swapped to pure black. The two passes exist so the parent can compute a real alpha channel by difference matting (a pixel that changed with the backing is background; one that didn't is object). Contact shadows come out as soft semi-transparent black, exactly what a drop shadow should be.
• Transparency comes only from the matte. Image models cannot emit alpha channels: a prompt asking for a "transparent background" gets a painted checkerboard, and chroma keys spill their key color onto the objects. So the words "transparent", "alpha", and "checkerboard" never appear in any prompt; the artifact crops get real transparency from the two-pass matte, done by script, after generation.
• 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 background 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; and the matte reads each pass's true backing color off the border ring, so an object touching the edge poisons the whole matte.

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 as one parallel wave. You carve six territories from the brief (Step 2), then all six personas spawn at once (Step 3), each composing a palette inside its own territory and staging it in two images. No chained reviews, no revision loops: distinctness is settled upfront by the territory assignments, and speed comes from doing everything in one wave.

Subagents start without your context, so every spawn task is self-contained: it carries the brief packet, the persona, the territory map, 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 numbers only name the personas; Step 2 pairs each with a territory.

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

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

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, and a carrier too small reads as noise. The cue's job is to show the palette, so the colors get real estate: frame tight on the subject rather than wide on the room, and stage each color as a large unbroken field. A wide atmospheric shot renders the palette as slivers the user cannot judge.

Light the scene to reveal color, not to set a mood. In a dim, dusky, or nocturnal rendering every hex sinks into one warm-brown murk the user cannot sample from, so bright, generous light is a hard rule even when the concept's moment is dark: an "after hours" or "dawn" concept keeps its props and story but is lit like a studio still, not like the hour. Dark palettes are welcome; dark renderings are not; a near-black primary should read as a rich, clearly-lit surface, not as underexposure. Fill every [bracketed] slot; never leave template language in the prompt.

One full-bleed photograph, 1500x1500 pixels, framed close: [one scene from
the product's world: subject and what it is doing, setting], the subject
filling most of the frame, not a wide view of the room. The scene contains
[artifact A], [artifact B], [artifact C], and [artifact D], all plainly
visible. Lighting: bright, clean, and generous, [direction and quality,
e.g. "soft daylight flooding in from a large window on the left"]; the
whole frame clearly lit, no area lost to darkness. Camera: [close framing
and lens, e.g. "85mm still life close-up at waist level, shallow depth of
field"]. Mood: [two or three adjectives from the brief's personality]. The
scene is art-directed as bold color blocking in a strict four-color story,
every color a large unbroken field, none reduced to a sliver: [color name]
([neutral hex]) as the ground, about half the frame; [color name]
([primary hex]) as one continuous mass over roughly a third of the frame,
carried by [the main subject]; [color name] ([secondary hex]) as a clear
supporting field on [a supporting element]; [color name] ([tertiary hex])
as one vivid accent, small but big enough to read at a glance, on
[a specific object]. Every color reads true and fully saturated in the
light, none sunk in shadow. Rich, saturated, editorial color; not a dim,
dusky, nocturnal, or candlelit image. 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.

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.

DARK PASS prompt

Runs as the third generation with the final cream sheet attached as the reference/input image. The matte's math needs the objects pixel-identical between passes and the backing as dark as the model will go, so the prompt is one narrow edit instruction; nothing about it varies per concept. Use it verbatim, no slots to fill:

Reproduce the attached photograph exactly, with a single change: replace
the flat warm-cream background with a perfectly flat, pure black
background, hex #000000, continuous edge to edge. Every object stays
pixel-identical: same position, same size, same colors, same lighting,
same details. Do not move, redraw, restyle, or relight anything. No text,
no borders, no watermark; the background becomes one uninterrupted pure
black everywhere the cream was.

Step 2: Carve the territories

Split the brief's color space into six territories, one per persona. Each is a one-line claim with two halves: a scene ground (a mood, a moment, a positioning angle) and, always, a hue ground it closes on (a named hue register). A hue-silent territory does not constrain color: give six specialists scenic territories and one shared brief, and every one of them will resolve to the brief's hue anchor; the hue ground is what makes the palettes diverge, the scene ground is what makes the stories diverge. Example set for a florist: "the delivery run before the city wakes: cold blue-teal dawn", "the atelier after hours: lacquer near-black with amber", "the potting bench: warm terracotta and unbleached paper", "gallery restraint: paper-white with one ink accent", "market-stall abundance: saturated market greens", "the drying room: muted botanical earth and rose".

Hard rules:

• No two hue grounds share a hue family. Six registers, six families.
• The Q1 hue anchor belongs to exactly one territory (two only when the brief argues for it). Name its owner; Step 3 tells everyone else the anchor is off-limits. An anchor left unassigned is an anchor every persona obeys.
• A territory claims colors, not lighting. "Lacquer near-black with amber" means those hues, staged in bright, clear light like every other palette; the HERO PROMPT skeleton forbids dim renderings, and a dark-moment territory ("after hours", "dawn") does not override it.
• The anti-reference (Q5) rules all six.

Assign each territory to the persona whose method suits it best (the Naturalist takes the most material ground, the Dramaturge the most emotional, the Empath the one closest to the audience's state).

Done when: six one-line territories exist, each closing on a hue ground, no two hue grounds in one family, the anchor owned by exactly one, each assigned to a persona.

Step 3: The wave (parallel)

If the harness exposes any subagent/spawn tool (Task, spawn_agent, agents, or similar), parallel is required, not preferred: emit all six spawns as one tool-call batch, a single message carrying six spawn calls, one persona per subagent, each doing the full job (palette, concept, all three generations), and only then wait for the reports. Spawning one, waiting for its report, then spawning the next is a serial loop and a failure even though every spawn "used a subagent"; so is generating any image yourself while a subagent tool exists. The whole run must take only as long as the slowest single persona. Attach the harness's image-generation skill to each spawn when the harness expects that (Codex: the imagegen skill). (No subagent tool at all: Step 4.)

Every spawn gets the same full template text, slots filled, shared blocks pasted verbatim. Writing spawn 1 in full and compressing spawns 2-6 down to summaries drops the rules exactly where the convergence risk is highest.

Task template:

You are a color specialist. You compose one brand palette inside an
assigned territory, then stage it in images. Use the harness's native
image generation tool; do not fall back to CLIs or APIs; do not edit repo
files.

PERSONA: [the persona's full numbered entry from The six personas]

[the BRIEF PACKET, verbatim]

YOUR TERRITORY: [this persona's one-line territory]

The territories assigned to the other five specialists, all off-limits:
[the other five territories, one line each]

The brief's hue anchor ([the Q1 anchor]) belongs to [its owner territory];
[if this persona owns it: "that is yours to carry" / otherwise: "your
primary must live in a different hue family"].

Your answer is unsuccessful if it occupies the same visual, emotional, or
strategic territory as another specialist, or if your primary lands in a
hue family another territory claims. Stay inside your own.

1. Compose your palette, in your persona's method, inside your territory:

[the PALETTE RULES block, verbatim]

2. Draft the concept for the palette:

[the CONCEPT RULES block, verbatim]

3. Critique your own work before touching any image. Check the palette
   against every PALETTE RULES line, against your territory's hue ground,
   and against the off-limits list; check the concept against every
   CONCEPT RULES line. Name each failure and fix it. A primary that
   drifted into another territory's hue family, or into an anchor you do
   not own, is a failure to fix now, not one to ship.

4. Build the hero prompt from this skeleton and generate the HERO image,
   1500x1500 (or the nearest supported square). Every image you generate
   must be square: a "1500x1500" line inside the prompt does not pin the
   canvas, so whenever the tool accepts a size or aspect-ratio parameter,
   pass square (1:1) explicitly, on this and every later generation. Five
   sibling specialists share the generation tool's output folder, so a
   default output name is a race that hands you a sibling's image: if the
   tool accepts an output filename, pass [slug]-hero.png, and work only
   with the exact file path the tool reports back for YOUR generation:

[the HERO PROMPT skeleton, with its fill rules]

   Open the result before moving on and check its light: if the image is
   dim, dusky, or nocturnal, with palette colors sinking into shadow
   instead of reading bright and true, regenerate the HERO once, same
   prompt, plus this line appended: "Render the scene in bright, generous
   daylight-quality studio light; every color fully lit and clearly
   readable, no darkness anywhere in the frame." Keep the second result
   regardless; the sheet in step 5 must reference whichever hero you
   keep.

5. Build the sheet prompt from this skeleton and generate the ARTIFACT
   SHEET, square again, output filename [slug]-artifacts.png, passing the
   hero file path the tool reported in step 4 as the reference/input
   image (the tool's image-edit or reference-image mode). Never point the
   reference at a generic hero.png in a shared folder:

[the SHEET PROMPT skeleton, with its notes]

6. Open both files you are about to ship and check them. First the
   canvas: each must be exactly square; the compile step rejects
   non-square images, so a landscape or portrait result is a failed
   generation, and the fix is regenerating with the tool's square (1:1)
   size/aspect parameter actually set, not editing the file. Then confirm
   they are yours: the hero shows your scene staging your palette, the
   sheet shows your four artifacts on cream. A wrong subject or palette
   means you picked up a sibling's file from the race in step 4:
   regenerate that image once with the [slug] filename. Then check the
   sheet's geometry: 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
   per check; keep the second result regardless.

7. Generate the DARK PASS with this prompt verbatim, output filename
   [slug]-dark.png, passing the final cream sheet from step 6 as the
   reference/input image (the tool's image-edit mode). The matte needs
   the two passes at identical dimensions, so pass the same size/aspect
   parameter as step 5. Open the result: if it is not the exact size of
   the cream sheet, if the background is not black, or if the objects
   moved or changed against the cream sheet, regenerate it once with the
   same prompt and keep the second result:

[the DARK PASS prompt]

8. Reply with exactly these five lines and nothing else, the paths being
   the files you verified in steps 6 and 7:

COMPLETED [slug]
HERO [absolute path to the hero PNG]
ARTIFACTS [absolute path to the final cream sheet PNG]
ARTIFACTS-DARK [absolute path to the dark pass PNG]
PALETTE primary=#RRGGBB;secondary=#RRGGBB;tertiary=#RRGGBB;neutral=#RRGGBB

If either generation fails, reply instead with one line:
ERROR [persona 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 loop using the territories you already carved. 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 persona has either a five-line COMPLETED report or an ERROR line. An ERROR persona 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: keep the same six territories and play all six personas yourself, one at a time and honestly in-method (the Naturalist names physical sources; the Constraint Poet writes its constraints before composing), following the Step 3 task from its step 1 (palette inside the territory, concept, hero, sheet, look-and-retry, dark pass) and recording the same facts a subagent would report (slug, all three paths, palette). The user still gets six cues; only the clock differs.

Same done-condition as Step 3, over all six personas.

Step 5: Matte, crop, and compile

Before anything else, two gates on the reported files:

• Unique: hash every reported hero (md5 [paths]); each must be unique. Two identical heroes mean two subagents raced on a shared default output filename; re-spawn one of the pair (same task) and take its fresh files before compiling.
• Square: check every reported image's dimensions (sips -g pixelWidth -g pixelHeight [paths] on macOS); width must equal height. Both scripts below reject non-square inputs, and squaring after the fact is off the table (cropping eats scene, padding invents background), so a non-square hero or cream sheet is a failed generation: re-spawn that persona once, with its same task, and take the fresh files. Still non-square after the re-spawn: drop the cue. (A non-square dark pass alone is handled below without a re-spawn.)

For each COMPLETED report, first fuse the two sheet passes into a transparent-background sheet:

node {{scripts_path}}/visual-cues.mjs matte [artifacts.png] [artifacts-dark.png] \
  --out [slug]-matted.png

Judge the matte by the stats it prints: healthy is transparentPct of at least 30 and opaquePct of at least 5. A tiny transparentPct means the dark pass never replaced the background; a tiny opaquePct means the model redrew the objects between passes; a size-mismatch error means the tool changed canvas between passes. Any of these, or any other command error: crop the cream sheet instead of the matted one below; an opaque cue beats a dropped cue. Do not retry the matte with the same inputs, its output is deterministic.

A dark pass alone failing the square gate does not need a re-spawn: matte rejects it as a command error and the cream-sheet fallback above covers the cue.

Then crop, carrying the report's slug and its PALETTE line:

node {{scripts_path}}/visual-cues.mjs crop [hero.png] [slug]-matted.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 it was given under masters/[slug]-artifacts.png, and quadrant-crops it into [slug]-2.png through [slug]-5.png, preserving the matte's alpha so each artifact ships as a transparent-background PNG. For each palette role it searches the hero for the closest rendered pixel (snapped, with its hero position), then updates cues.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.