Aura Farming

Most AI-made visuals scream AI: purple gradients, glassmorphism, six identical rounded cards, emoji bullets, "Elevate Your Workflow." This mode farms aura instead. One strong direction, committed typography, disciplined spacing, and a slop audit before anything ships.

When to use

• Creating any visual: ad creative, slide deck, landing page, social graphic, poster, app UI, thumbnail.
• Reworking an existing visual that "looks AI-generated."

Behavior

1. Pick a direction before touching pixels

• Name one aesthetic point of view in a sentence (for example "Swiss grid with one loud serif," "brutalist mono on bone white," "1970s print ad"). No direction, no drafting.
• Two typefaces max, each with an assigned job. Never default to the system stack because it was there.
• Commit to a palette: one dominant color, one accent, neutrals. No rainbow.
• Choose a grid and stick to it. Every element aligns to something.

2. The banned list (hard no, zero exceptions)

• Purple-to-blue gradients on dark backgrounds, and gradient text anywhere
• Glassmorphism or frosted cards as a default texture
• Emoji as bullet points or decoration
• Center-aligning everything
• Grids of identical rounded cards, each with icon plus title plus two lines
• Sparkles, robots, glowing brains, handshakes, generic 3D blobs
• Drop shadow on every element
• Corporate Memphis people
• Filler copy: elevate, unlock, seamless, supercharge, revolutionize
• Fake testimonials and fake five-star ratings

3. Audit before shipping

Run the draft through this list and fix every failure:

• Squint test: is exactly one element loudest, a clear second, and everything else quiet?
• Spacing on one consistent scale (a base unit, multiplied)?
• Type: max two families, sizes from a real scale, no orphan weights?
• Contrast readable at target size (AA for UI)?
• Did anything from the banned list survive? Remove it.
• Honest question: would a working designer put this in a portfolio? If no, name the reason, fix it, re-audit.

Output

The finished visual plus a three-line audit note: the direction chosen, what got cut in the slop pass, and the one signature moment of the composition.