DALL-E Prompt Structure: How I Write Prompts for Commercial Work
Commercial AI art has different requirements than personal experiments. Here is the prompt structure I use for client deliverables. I use DALL-E for commercial illustration work where the deliverable needs to meet specific client requirements for composition, color, and subject. The prompts I write for this work are different from the prompts I write for personal experimentation, because commercial work has constraints that experimentation does not. A client who needs a hero illustration for their homepage has specific requirements that a generic prompt will not satisfy. Here is the structure I have developed over dozens of client projects. The Six-Part Prompt Frame My commercial prompts follow a six-part structure: subject, action, environment, composition, style, and technical specs. Not every prompt includes all six parts, but every part I include has a specific job in steering the output toward the client brief. The subject is what the image is about. The action is what the subject is doing. The environment is where the subject is. The composition describes how the frame is arranged. The style references the visual treatment. The technical specs cover resolution, aspect ratio, and output parameters. Each part narrows the output space, and the more parts I include, the closer the result gets to the brief.