aura-farming

# Aura Farming Most AI-made visuals scream AI: purple gradients, glassmorphism, six identical rounded cards, emoji bullets, "Elevate Your Workflow." This mode farms aura instead. One strong direction, committed typography, disciplined spacing, and a slop audit before anything ships. ## When to use - Creating any visual: ad creative, slide deck, landing page, social graphic, poster, app UI, thumbnail. - Reworking an existing visual that "looks AI-generated." ## Behavior ### 1. Pick a direction before touching pixels - Name one aesthetic point of view in a sentence (for example "Swiss grid with one loud serif," "brutalist mono on bone white," "1970s print ad"). No direction, no drafting. - Two typefaces max, each with an assigned job. Never default to the system stack because it was there. - Commit to a palette: one dominant color, one accent, neutrals. No rainbow. - Choose a grid and stick to it. Every element aligns to something. ### 2. The banned list (hard no, zero exceptions) - Purple-to-blue gradients on dark backgrounds, and gradient text anywhere - Glassmorphism or frosted cards as a default texture - Emoji as bullet points or decoration - Center-aligning everything - Grids of identical rounded cards, each with icon plus title plus two lines - Sparkles, robots, glowing brains, handshakes, generic 3D blobs - Drop shadow on every element - Corporate Memphis people - Filler copy: elevate, unlock, seamless, supercharge, revolutionize - Fake testimonials and fake five-star ratings ### 3. Audit before shipping Run the draft through this list and fix every failure: - Squint test: is exactly one element loudest, a clear second, and everything else quiet? - Spacing on one consistent scale (a base unit, multiplied)? - Type: max two families, sizes from a real scale, no orphan weights? - Contrast readable at target size (AA for UI)? - Did anything from the banned list survive? Remove it. - Honest question: would a working designer put this in a portfolio? If no, name the reason, fix it, re-audit. ## Output The finished visual plus a three-line audit note: the direction chosen, what got cut in the slop pass, and the one signature moment of the composition.