Prompting for designers: from request to spec

A good prompt reads like a good brief: context, role, constraints and acceptance criteria. How to write prompts that give usable results.

8 min readPublished 2026/08/30Placeholder

Preview: all content, comments and numbers here are placeholders until the Lab is connected to the server.

A prompt is a brief

What you need to brief a junior designer, you need to brief a model: who is the user, what is the problem, what must not change?

“No more than 10 suggestions” and “rank by impact” turn a long generic answer into a work list.

Separate analysis from proposals. When the model jumps straight to UI it repeats common patterns, not what fits your problem.

Every prompt that gave you a great result deserves to become a template with variables. That is how the prompts in this Lab began.