5 Prompt Patterns I Reuse Across Every Creative AI Tool
After working with six different AI image generators, I found that the same prompt patterns work across all of them. Here are the five I always use. I have used six different AI image generation tools for client and personal work, and I noticed that certain prompt patterns produce good results regardless of which tool I am using. The tools differ in their specific syntax and parameters, but the underlying patterns that steer them toward useful output are surprisingly universal. Here are the five patterns I reuse across every tool, with examples of how I adapt them. Pattern One: Subject Before Style Every prompt I write starts with the subject and ends with the style. This ordering matters more than you would expect. When the style comes first, the model sometimes treats the style description as the subject and produces an image about the style rather than an image in the style. A cat, sitting on a windowsill, watercolor illustration produces a cat illustration. Watercolor illustration of a cat on a windowsill sometimes produces an illustration about watercolor as a medium. The subject-first pattern keeps the focus on what the image is about, with the style as a modifier. I have tested this ordering across Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, and the subject-first version produces more on-target results in all three. The pattern is simple but consistently effective.