At a workshop in January, I was showing a room of investors how to use AI for design work. At one point I pulled up a workflow I’d been using and walked them through it step by step.
Before I finished, one of the investors had his phone out, pulling up Pinterest, and saving coffee shops he liked.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what aesthetic I want for our new office space for three months,” he said. “I think I just did it in ten minutes.”
This is one of those workflows that seems almost too simple. Three steps. Costs nothing. And it does something that traditionally costs $10,000 and takes weeks.
The Problem It Solves
When you’re building something visual — a brand, a space, a product line — you need to be able to describe what you want. Not just “I like this vibe” but the actual vocabulary: the design style, the lighting, the color relationships, the era, the influences.
Without that vocabulary, you’re stuck. AI image generators give you generic outputs when your prompts are vague. Designers charge by the hour to extract your vision through lengthy discovery sessions. And you end up going back and forth, trying to articulate something you feel but can’t quite name.
The bottleneck isn’t taste. Most people have perfectly good taste. The bottleneck is translation — turning what you see and feel into words precise enough to brief a designer or prompt an AI.
The Three Steps
Step 1: Build a Pinterest board of your aesthetic.
Go to Pinterest and search for the type of space, brand, or product that feels like what you’re going for. If it’s a coffee shop, search “coffee shop interior” and save the ones that feel right. If it’s a clothing brand, search competitors and inspirations. If it’s a home or office space, look up interior designers or hotels you admire.
Save 20 to 30 images that represent the target aesthetic. Don’t overthink it. If it resonates visually, save it.
Step 2: Upload to ChatGPT and ask it to name the pattern.
Create a new chat in ChatGPT. Upload the images (or the board if you can export it). Then ask something like: “What do all of these have in common? What’s the design language, the aesthetic style, the visual elements? Give me the exact terms I’d use to describe this to an AI image generator or a professional designer.”
ChatGPT will tell you. It might say something like “Japandi-influenced with wabi-sabi elements, warm neutrals, natural materials, diffused northern light, and a mix of organic and geometric forms.” Or it’ll point to a specific architectural era, a regional influence, a photographic style.
These are the words you needed. And finding them used to require either years of design education or paying someone who had it.
Step 3: Use the vocabulary.
Now you have precise language. Drop those terms into your AI image prompts and watch the quality of outputs jump. Use them in your brief to a designer — they’ll spend less time guessing and more time executing. Add them to your brand guide so anyone on your team can create on-brand visuals.
The investor who pulled out his phone at my workshop walked away with a design brief for his office in the time it took most people to answer their email.
Why This Works
This is essentially reverse-engineering expertise. A good designer’s value is partly their taste, but a huge part of it is vocabulary. The ability to identify and name what makes something look the way it does. That translation layer is expensive to buy and slow to develop on your own.
ChatGPT has seen enough design photography, architecture, and visual content to recognize patterns. It can’t generate taste from scratch, but it’s very good at pattern recognition. At naming what you’re already looking at. At bridging the gap between your visual intuition and the precise language needed to brief an AI or a human.
I think of this as building your Camera Language for Images — the vocabulary needed to direct an image AI like a director briefing a cinematographer. Once you have it, your prompts stop being guesses.
One Good Use Case You Might Not Have Thought Of
This workflow isn’t just for brand design.
If you’re pre-selling a product that doesn’t exist yet — using AI-generated photorealistic images to validate demand before manufacturing — you need your images to look extremely specific and compelling. Vague prompts give you vague renders.
Run this workflow first. Get your design vocabulary. Then use it in your product rendering prompts. The difference in output quality is real.
Start Here
This week, pick something you’ve been meaning to nail down visually — a brand, a space, a product, a presentation aesthetic.
Go to Pinterest. Spend 15 minutes saving what resonates. Upload to ChatGPT. Ask it to name the pattern.
You’ll have your design brief in half an hour. For free.
Want to go deeper on AI tools and workflows that actually save money? Check out the 4-Day AI Sprint — four days of practical AI skills you can use immediately.
