Guide

How to give an assistant precise layout and content instructions

The useful part of a prompt is not the adjectives. It is the shape of the answer: how long, in what tense, about what, leaving what out - written once per zone rather than once for the whole page.

Why one long prompt is hard to control

Describe a whole poster in a paragraph and the assistant has to decide which sentence applies to which part of it. It will decide, usually sensibly, and you will have no way to say “that was the caption, not the headline” - because the prompt never made the distinction. The result is not bad, it is unaddressable.

A zone per part inverts that. Each instruction has one place to land, so an answer that is wrong is wrong in one zone, and fixing it is a sentence rather than a rewrite. That is the entire argument for a template, and it is why the instructions matter more than the layout.

The four things a zone instruction should carry

What it is. The job of the zone, in the terms you would use to a colleague: a headline, a caption, a table of specifications.
The shape of the answer. How long, how many, in what tense, in what voice. Anything countable should be counted - “three sentences” is followed far more reliably than “keep it short”.
The subject. What the words are about, and who is reading them. An assistant that knows the reader writes differently, and this is one line.
The exclusions. What not to write. Exclusions are the most skipped and the most effective part: no exclamation marks, no brand comparisons, no claims about safety, no puns.

The same headline, twice

Vague: a subject and an adjective

Headline: write something catchy about our new running shoe.

Specific: a shape, a subject and a limit

Headline: one sentence, twelve words or fewer, present tense, naming the
shoe and the surface it is for. No exclamation marks, no puns, no "introducing".
The reader is deciding whether to read the next line, not whether to buy yet.

Both are one line in the app. The second one cannot be improved by a better assistant - only by better words - which is the point: the instruction is the part of the process you control.

Put the limits where the words are

A limit belongs to the zone it constrains, not to a preamble. If the body copy has three sentences and a metric-only rule, that is the body copy's business - and writing it there is what stops it from quietly applying to the headline as well.

An instruction with its own limits

Body copy: three sentences. Say what the fabric does in the first,
who it suits in the second, and what it weighs in the third. Metric units.
No claims about injury prevention, no comparisons to other brands.

The same limit written once at the top of a brief is a rule for the whole document. If that is what you mean, say it in the document's own instructions - not in the first zone's, where it will be read as local.

Say what each zone is for, not just what it says

Two zones can hold identical text and mean entirely different things: the brand's own line, or a footnote nobody is meant to read first. Nothing about a zone's size, position or colour settles that, so it is asked directly - and it is the one answer an assistant cannot derive from the geometry.

Declaring the role is also what stops an assistant from filling a zone that should stay empty. A logo zone with a brand-identity role gets a company name; the same zone with no role gets invented copy, because a box with nothing said about it is a box with a hole in the design.

Keep the composition in the document, not in the zone

Instructions like “make this the most important thing on the page” do not belong in a zone: the page is not that zone's to arrange. Emphasis is what the roles and the geometry already say, and a zone that tries to claim it is a zone arguing with the document.

What to do when the answer overruns

Count instead of describing. “Two sentences” beats “be brief” every time, and it is also the version you can check.
Add the exclusion you just discovered. Most overruns are one specific habit - a summary paragraph, a closing question, a trailing call to action - and naming it is usually permanent.
Give the zone less room and say so. A frame that fits eighty characters is an instruction in itself.
Re-export after editing. The document you paste is the document you designed; editing the paste instead is how a template stops matching its own export.

The export reference shows what actually travels in the document you paste, and the guides cover which format to choose: export formats, Markdown vs JSON vs XML.

Write one See worked examples