Introduction

My name is Marcus.

From Messaging to Visual Direction: The Challenge

I am an agency owner, co -founder at Portrait Coffee, executive education coach, and a lot of the work that I do, and I'm wondering if I can zoom it.

Oh, you guys see that? Okay,

a lot of the work that I do is in the creative space.

So I had a challenge for a client.

I was building a messaging system.

Client Context and Initial Brief

So kind of like our friend Caitlin here, a lot of my creative work starts with writing so I was helping a lifestyle entrepreneur who wanted to launch a new business and a lot of the work that we had done was building out

the the messaging system so positioning statements tag lines like all of those types of things but there was an opportunity to add value to the work by creating a visual component now in a typical agency setting you would then

hire a creative director or a graphic designer to sort of complete that next phase of work but I didn't have the resources and I didn't quite have the

A Mindset Shift: Ask How AI Can Help

time to do that so sitting there and I'll teach you a quick hack for practical AI use if you're ever in the situation that I was in I thought to to myself, I wonder if AI could help me do this.

And so I use this basic prompt that is gonna start our journey today, that if you take nothing else away from my presentation, I would say, please take this mindset shift.

If you're stuck in your work, or you're feeling under -resourced, whether that's in time or in having a collaborator, I would highly encourage you to make the mindset shift to ask, how can AI help me do this thing?

Designing a Custom GPT Collaborator

And so what I'm going to do is show you a few prompts that I use to create a custom GPT, how I built the instructions to make the custom GPT actually effective. And then the output that I was able to arrive to to please my client and then get an upsell to move past just building the messaging system to becoming a retainer marketing partner for the client.

so in my case what I was working on was a I needed support from a creative direction standpoint so after asking myself how can I use AI to help me with this I just gave a very simple prompt in chat GPT the reason I use GPT for this

particular task and not Claude or a one of the Microsoft products was because GPT is incredible with creative brainstorming and it's back -end reasoning is pretty powerful so I'll get into like some why that matters here in a second but I just want to show you all the prompt that I use to get this

The Seed Prompt for a Creative Director

started so what I said was hey draft the prompt to instruct GPT to act as an experienced creative director working on a millennial lifestyle brand celebrating celebrating dinner as a lifestyle hobby I want GPT to help me create a visual presentation sort 10 photos into three visual themes and then give visual language to describe the three image

themes so a little bit of back end for those of you who are not marketers here so I want to kind of talk about this in two swim lanes ultimately what I'm doing is I'm just using straight up language to tell gpt build instructions for yourself to help me help you right so in your

case it could be what what are some uh maybe someone can throw out an example of a time where you needed a collaborator but you didn't have one and maybe you'd like to to build one what what's a role that's that typically sits across from you that you could tip that you could use collaboration with and sometimes you don't have access to okay so video editing in my

particular use case I needed a creative director but if I were you what I would say is draft a prompt to instruct GPT to act as an experienced video editor working on give it a little bit of context on what you're working on and then a few instructions on what you would need now your use case is a

little would be a little bit different you don't need something super specific is like sorting out images or things like that but that's how you can use this prompt to be more specific in your context so I knew exactly what I was going for and I knew I had an idea of the output that I was trying to

Reverse Prompting to Improve Outputs

arrive to so to make this tricky a little bit this is what we would call reverse prompting so I know a lot of folks if you joined or if you've been a part of any AI conversation a couple of things that you're going to hear

especially if you're working with information or creativity is that it gives bad it's gonna give you slop basically so one trick that you can use to help AI help you get to a better output is to just after you give your

prompt say something simple like ask me a few questions to give you context to to help me build the proper collaborator. So that's just directing the GPT to ask you questions

before it gets started, is one way you can zoom past getting slopped back and actually arrive at a better output.

Again, this reverse prompting taps into GPT's reasoning capabilities and it's really strong at this.

and again it's why it's the preferred platform for building a collaborator in my opinion you can do the same thing on Gemini you could probably do the same thing Jim and a lot of people use Gemini to do this it'd be building a gym but I

Drafting the System Prompt and Clarifying Questions

prefer GPT so let's drop this in and see what we get back so here's a draft of the prompt you asked for followed by a short list set of clarifying questions so I can help you dial this into the exact collaborator that you need so

So draft prompt, creative director for a millennial lifestyle brand, system prompt draft. So ultimately what we're building is the set of instructions that I'm going to use as the back end to actually build the collaborator.

Peeking Behind the Curtain: Using GPT to Generate Instructions

So just to kind of peek behind the curtain, if you're using GPT to build something, you can absolutely start by saying, I'm going to build this thing and I need you to give me instructions to build that thing. So in the case of using something like Replit, you might say, hey, write a program requirement document for an app that translates call transcripts to mock marketing campaigns. And if you give it enough context, it'll do that for you. You can enter it into the system and iterate.

Why 10 Images and How the System Works

But in our case, we're just building a custom GPT. So here are the instructions that it gave. It says, you know, you're collaborating on a brand. Your role is to analyze and sort 10 uploaded images. I picked 10 because prior to this, I researched how many images can you put into ChatGPT before it crashes out. And it told me 10.

So name each theme with a memorable brand align title. title, provide deep visual language for each theme, describing mood, color palettes, textures, emotional tone, photography, use cases, offer guidance on how these three themes could appear in a visual presentation, da -da -da -da, right? So I get these, these are instructions for the program to build this collaborator.

Answering Clarifying Questions with Existing Context

So then it's going to ask me clarifying questions to tune the collaborator. So So I'm leveraging the A .I. to leverage me so that it can give me better results.

So what I might do is say, OK, what's the core personality of this brand? Is it sensual? Is it slow living? What kind of presentation are you trying to build? How would you describe the intended aesthetic in a sentence or two?

OK, so what I haven't done is given it context that I've already used with the client. So those questions that it's asking, I've already taken care of that in a prior phase of the work, building out the language system. So I just want to be able to show you. So I'll say, OK, I'll just give a few answers to these questions.

I'll say the brand is centered on celebrating pleasure for pleasure's sake. I might say to see attached, just to give it an answer, but then to save us a little bit of time, I'm going to say see attached documents for more context and answers to your questions and to discern what good would look like in this context. So to help us build this collaborator, I'm just going to come in and upload a few files.

Uploading Prior Work to Ground the Model

So I mentioned that this I had already done previous work. So basically what I'm going to do is leverage the messaging system that I've already built.

I'm going to grab a visual presentation, a set of creative direction that I've already built and I'm just going to upload it here. So basically what I'm doing is I could go through and answer these questions and in a previous session i did to get to the end result that we've already built

but one thing i want to show you is that in order to keep the integrity of your work sometimes it just helps to document your systems or document work that you've already done because in a sense when you're building when you're using an llm particularly gpt what you're ultimately doing is training a co -worker and a better way to do that than just sort of going back and forth this is just say hey here's an example or a time where I've already done this work use this and catch up so I'll just send this in okay so great

Arriving at a Solid System Prompt

with your brand positioning rooted into this here are more precise here's a more set of precise system prompts for you to build your GPT. So I'm not going to read through all of this, but basically what we've just built is a system prompt.

So how many of you have built a custom GPT or a custom collaborator using chat before? Okay, so cool. Then that means that this might actually be helpful for some people. So basically what all of this text is, you could

Building and Configuring the Custom GPT

think about this as the job description for what this creative collaborator is ultimately going to do so we already have this i'm going to jump a little bit ahead in the timeline sequence because again i've already built this collaborator i named it after the client and it does what it all it does everything that it needs to do but i'll switch over here using that same um process that

Tuning the Job Description and Instructions

i just showed y 'all here is here are the longer and more beneficial instructions that gpt kind of came up with for me if you use that same type of prompting and use that reverse prompting technique in your context you'll get a bunch of text like this that's relevant to your context i would highly recommend that you read it make sure it's fine -tuned but the next step once you've built

that system prompt and so what we're doing and this is you know everyone kind of talks about how AI can save you time once at one time saving thing that we're doing is we're not just jumping into chat and just going back and forth to get one thing done we're actually training a bot to be able to what I'm going to tell you how to do this stuff one time and then from there I want you to know what I need you to do use the context that I've given you and we can

jump in and do this stuff like lightning so once you have your system prompt already built next

Explore vs. Create: Saving Time with Existing GPTs

what you're going to want to do is come over here to the sidebar on GPTs and hit explore and then if you're ever if you ever want to save more time than even just building your own GPT to help you with work people are building GPTs all day every day you can just come in here and just

search a GPT for what you're doing so say you are a construction project manager you can type those those basic terms in I'm sure somebody's people have

probably built like 500 of those maybe if you're an esthetician and you're looking for quick hits on like skincare or sanitation on and on what it means to take care of hair and nails or things like that if you just come in to this

section and chat type it up somebody's probably already built this stuff the the good thing about knowing how to build your own is in the the buzz and the hype about ai one of the best things you can do is just figure out what you need from it yes you can leverage things that others have built

yes you can jump in and play around with chat but if you can use this technique to build the co -worker that you need you can get better results and you can save you can save time so here we're

Creating and Naming the Assistant

going to do is we're going to hit create and next what you're going to get is so you could we you could go in and if you if you hadn't already leveraged chat to build the prompts you could just come in here and say hey how can i do this but we've saved our time by just jumping up and

saying like give me some instructions to give to build a custom gpt so since we've already done that work next what we could do is just come over here to configure so we can name our gpt does

anybody want to give this one a name just throw something out you use your name creative buddy okay so description you are a creative director supporting a strategist with visual outputs

all right so i promise this is going to get good in a second once we start seeing the visuals that it creates so that whole system prompt that we created we're going to put that in on instructions

Thinking of Instructions as a Job Description

so one way that you can rethink yeah one way you can rethink about these instructions it's kind of like the job description that you're giving the gpt if you want to save even more time

on this if you have say you're a a marketing leader or you lead a team and you have direct rec reports maybe you've lost a team member or maybe that team member is on pto or they're just unavailable for a week and you need that thought partnership if you have the job description handy you could just come in and plug it in here and refine but since we created our own i'm just

Grounding with Files: Voice, Examples, and Brand Systems

going to paste those instructions in here next i'm going to upload a few files so this is going going to be a quick way again by having work that you've already done and feeding it into the system you can train you can save time by training it on your voice your expertise give it an example of

what good looks like so i just so happen to have the the brand messaging platform that we i already have the brand messaging i did three hour and a half sessions a lot of work went into crafting it so i don't have to recreate the wheel here i'm just going to feed it in and then i also have

how many y 'all are familiar with portrait coffee okay cool so I did the creative direction for that brand so in order to save myself time I'm gonna use what I did what I did with portrait to say this is an example of what good

looks like so I'm gonna upload that here and so now it has its own set of instructions so now I'm gonna kind of this thing is ready to go so in a second

Publishing and Sharing with Clients and Teams

when I hit create a new action or yeah if I hit create it's going to publish I'd have the option to say okay this is good only only I want access to this I can say anyone with the link or I could say just put this on the GPT store so the cool thing about setting this up for anyone with the

link in my case what i did was the client didn't she just wanted the brand messaging system using gpt i was able to also do some creative direction and i said hey i built you a creative director that you can use so it's a great opportunity to provide more value on top of what was already

asked but if you're working in a team context and you build a collaborator and you push that link out you can your your team can jump in so if you're leading a group of sales professionals professionals or if you're leading a group of, you know, social impact leaders and they need to

be able to tap into a certain mindset or a certain way of doing things, you can build an agent form, ship it out to the team, and instead of hitting you up with questions and things, they can go into the collaborator and do it.

Curation Before Creation: Image Sourcing Workflow

But I want to take a step back, and this is an aside that I wanted to give specifically for creative so how many people in here identify as creative sweet okay okay we'll give a little yeah i say probably everybody in here on some level is

creative so one resource i use there's there's a number of ways that you can use image generators in gpt to to get to great images and things like that but for our visual purposes i'm not using gpt

for the sake of creation, I'm using it for curation.

So one tool, and this is just for personal integrity to be able to keep the human in the loop, if you will.

So some backend work that I did prior to getting

Using Are.na to Curate Visual Inspiration

to the point of building a GPT, I used Arena. That's A -R -E dot N -A. If you've never heard of this, it's basically Pinterest

with a more hardcore set of curated images so I came into arena and I probably spent about a week curating images that were relevant to this brand so came here and these are these are a set of images that really spoke to the ethos and sort of the feel of where I knew that I was going and ultimately why

why I had to ask GPT how many images can I put in to get you to process and synthesize.

So if you're a creative and you're ever looking for visual inspiration, something that you can use like pre -process, I would highly recommend using Arena.

Again, it works like Pinterest with some different functionality, but in my opinion, it has a more curated set of images that you're just not gonna find out there on Instagram or out there on Pinterest.

Preparing Assets for the GPT Collaborator

So the cool thing about this is once I've like actually curated this set of beautiful images and beautiful GIFs, I was able to come up here and download these images. It'll create a slideshow for you or you can just hardcore download the images.

I hardcore downloaded them so at this point I've got the language system that I've already built I've got images that speak to the ethos of sort of where I want the brand to go and now I'm getting ready to create this GPT that's going to

Clear Instructions for Image Sorting and Style Guidance

help me create a it's going to help me synthesize these images I'm the I didn't read through all of the text but the images are the instructions that I gave it was take these 10 images, group them into three visual themes, create language

that describes those visual themes, recommend a color palette, and recommend fonts that go with those images and the visual themes that you recommend.

So those were the instructions that I gave it and by the time I hit publish or hit hit create.

And so I'm going to keep this private. Okay, so I've got the link, I don't need to view it, it'll be stored over on the side here.

Running the Workflow: From Images to Themes

So once I, or once you in this case, refresh, so now your new assistant, when you open your GPT, or your chat GPT is going to be over here on the the right, but I'm going to go ahead and use the curator that I've already built just to show you how it works, leveraging the instructions that I gave it.

So I'm going to come over here, and now that I've collected and downloaded those images, I'm sure y 'all don't want or don't need to see all the stuff that I have on my desktop, even though you want to. That's not the focus here.

Uploading Assets and Kicking Off the Process

So I'm going to grab about 10 images. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Boom.

So I'm going to say, here are the images I'd like you to use and help me get to a new client presentation. Boom. Boom.

So it already has those instructions. I don't have to recreate the the wheel on this, but it knows what to do. I've already told it what to do.

And so here's the output that I'm going to get.

Interpreting the Output: Themes and Visual Language

So basically what this has done is it's created the first thing, rituals of refinement.

Now, in another context, what I would have done is actually gone through and pick the ten that give me more diversity and range but I just picked in here just a little bit of integrity so what this is ultimately doing is it's turning the

images into textual language so it's just so it's saying basically included images one two six and ten here's the visual languages these images lean into structured elegance geographic geometric framing archival symbolism and reverent stillness.

Now to you, this may not mean very much, but because I've already built that language system, I have a bit of accountability to know that this is not slop.

I also have the option to go through and refine this, but I'm saving myself a ton, a ton, a ton of time.

If you've ever built anything creative, you know that a lot of the decision -making that you're doing goes into the curating those images.

So again, I spent like two weeks curating those images where this is saving me time is it's doing the grouping for me and it's actually building the language so

Color Palettes, Sequencing, and Presentation Notes

then it's going to give me theme to group those images now it's going to give me those unifying narratives i'm going to get a suggested color palette it's going to sequence the the notes like hey you should present these in this order all those types of things like that and so

Iterating with Visual Requests

So, ultimately, I'll show you a little bit of the, so I might say, for theme three, and this is where we can start to get visual, for theme three, show me an image with the color palette, show me an image with the colors organized horizontally. So, it's going to do a little bit of thinking.

and here in a second I'll show y 'all the the end product that I ultimately use to

Human-in-the-Loop: Where AI Saves Time

do the presentation but what I want to score is where I'm saving time is again this is a leg of the creative process that I would have actually needed a designer that would have actually needed a creative director to fill in for but because I didn't have those resources and because I didn't have that time I

built this collaborator now I could still work with a creative director I I could still work with that human on the other side of the loop and say, hey, man, I've saved us a lot of time on going back and forth. Here's something that I built. Can you just kind of take this forward?

So in my case and honestly, when I the first time I did this, I did have to prompt it a little bit to get the right color palette that I needed.

The Final Deliverable and Results

But basically, here is what I got to on. Here's here's a look at sort of the final product.

Example Theme: Playful Precision

so using those instructions and using the brand system that I'd already built I was able to organize the photos that I've already created into this first theme it was called playful precision these are the images that it used to

group those these are the these are the groups of images that it used to create that theme it came up with the justifier for why this set of images actually ties back to the brand and then it further connected to the brand language and I didn't have to do

very much to get it to do this and it also gave language justification for why this matches not only the brand but why these colors match with the original photos that I curated and also if you've

Validating Type Pairings and Brand Fit

ever had if you've ever done any work trying to find fonts you know that that's a full -time job in and of itself, but based on those basic system instructions that I gave it, it actually recommended this first pair of fonts to go with this actual theme.

So Maison Numono and GT Alpina Typewriter.

So before I put these in, I actually did the legwork of looking up where to license these fonts, actually looking at them, making sure that they actually pair together.

And this is not a graphic design seminar but I will say I was blown away by with the instructions that I gave it how I was actually able to make some pretty solid recommendations on fonts that go together with the pairings of those images so that was one of the themes color palette font pairing that I got

Additional Themes and Favorite Outcomes

the next one was emotional type so again it's grouping these images here is another color palette that it gave me and here was another and I like to show this one because it was my favorite here's another font like primary and secondary font that it gave me uh it did you know so it did basically did this three times over and what

Impact: Upsell, Time Savings, and New Services

i was able to do this was not a section of the work that i was getting paid to do but it was an opportunity to provide more value and sort of upsell the client because basically what i was hired to do was the written message system but i think it took me i mean this could be three months

of work if this is the line of work that you're in and you know this leg of the process could take three months I mean I took three weeks and put a lot of work into curating the images because I knew that the that was going to need to carry

most of the work but when it came time to actually create this presentation and justify the logic to the client this process actually took me three hours and so I don't necessarily want to harp on the time saved because unless you do do this type of work that might not mean as much to you but for me it was incredible and again as

A Repeatable Process for Ongoing Work

someone for whom like graphic design art direction is not my primary piece of work being able to leverage just the basic language function of GPT to say hey I'm trying to build a custom collaborator that does this give me the instructions to give to that collaborator then go into the created GPT section give those instructions and then be able to come back and

say okay it's time to cook this is the specific thing that we're going to do so now I'm able to I've just unlocked pretty much a new line of business for myself because doing messaging systems is my bread and butter not so much visual direction but this is a quick way for me to now

upsell this work goes over to a graphic designer or to a graphic design studio who's gonna complete the work or finish out that leg but with three weeks and three hours this is a reliable tool that now I can come in so I probably use this once a week or at least every when I'm onboarding

a new client so I'm not on not I've not only unlocked a new source of revenue I'm saving myself three months of work and also if I decide to kick it to a creative director or a visual designer they can take this and run with it I'm able to express myself a lot more creatively and I'm actually pretty excited that GPT a language model could actually assist me in those visual capacities so if I could just kind of

Applying the Method to Your Own Work

step back a little bit and say hey my use case was building a collaborator that could help me with visuals your use case may be a proposal writer right so

Generic Template: Build Your Collaborator

So if you've got three proposals that you that you know are good or that you've used to build work, just jump into GPT. Say, hey, I'm trying to build a collaborator. I needed to do this. Give me the best instructions.

Ask me 10 questions before you get started. Go for it.

Build that collaborator. Test it out.

Make It Routine: Weekly Use for Transformation

Make something that you can use at least once a week. And that's a very practical way that you can transform your work.

So that's what I did.

Conclusion

That's a little bit about how it can be applicable to you. and I hope that was helpful.