# Curated Style Guides — Motivation & Brief Also known as: **Prompt Lab** · **Playground** Write-up only. --- ## 1. Project framing Curated Style Guides is **eight standalone books**, all built in the digital archive: 1. **Architecture** 2. **Botany & Birds** 3. **Educational Explainers** 4. **Layout Design** 5. **Children's book illustration** 6. **Concept art** 7. **Product design** 8. **Cartography** Each book holds about **sixty unique styles**, sourced from real Midjourney-centric catalogs — primarily Midlibrary, with peers where they add unique named looks (Srefs.co, Geniea, sref-midjourney.com). Styles are live named pages with deep links and seeded previews. **Print selection is deferred:** after starring and grouping in the digital catalog, choose about **four** of the eight for print teasers. All eight stay maintained digitally. The goal is visually rich, printable style-reference material: something you can get inspiration from, and also turn into something actionable. Print form stays open — cards, decks, or books. --- ## 2. Motivation — why this exists When you are mid-prompt and feel stuck, this unlocks it. Curated Style Guides is a **prompt lab** and a **playground**: a pocket inventory of real Midjourney styles you can open, see seeded up, and remix. Each page is a spark — not a finished commission — meant to **spark imaginative variations** and get you moving again when the blank prompt freezes you. It is visually rich enough to print and keep nearby, and structured enough to act on: pick a look, read the tags, swap a variable, and unlock the next variation. --- ## 3. Scale — book as teaser, digital as archive The **printed book is a teaser** — a window into a curated page you can browse. - **Print target:** about **sixty pages** per book — roughly **fifty styles**, plus about **ten pages** for hot keywords, views, featured gallery, and visual inspiration in a tight grid. - **Digital catalog:** an **ongoing maintained archive** the author collects over time — deeper, fresher, and far better maintained than the physical book. IDs on print pages point into that catalog. Print stays light and private-friendly; digital carries the full living record. --- ## 4. Per-source visual range Within each book’s visual harvest, keep sources **pure-play** and **serially numbered** per source: - About **40 styles from source one** - About **40 from source two** - About **40 from source three** Each run stays true to that source’s material — Midlibrary run, peer-two run, peer-three run — without mixing until a later messier pass. Serial numbers reset or namespace per source/page block as needed. --- ## 5. Featured gallery A couple of pages of **interesting spreads**: a **visual grid with no prompt names** — only **square numbered thumbnails**, each with **one QR** linking to the digital catalog where the named source and saved archive live. Gallery numbers may **share or diverge** from style-page ID space — leave that decision open until the digital catalog schema is locked. --- ## 6. Deeper pages (star-and-nominate) After the skeleton is reviewed, the author **manually picks** up to about **thirty styles** for deeper treatment: full spreads with detailed text. Flow: **star and nominate** from the pure-play harvest → those nominated styles get the rich page treatment (rendering, prompt sentences, keyword pairs, ID, dual QR). --- ## 7. Per-book variation vocabularies (tag cloud) Keyword pairs sit beside each style so you can madlib without leaving the page. The same vocab feeds a **tag cloud** for browsing. ### Architecture - **Views:** elevation, axonometric, isometric, cutaway, night photo, dusk silhouette - **Vantage points:** street, plaza, aerial, courtyard, threshold, roof - **Locations:** desert, harbor, forest edge, dense city, campus, ruin field - **Weather:** clear, fog, rain sheen, snow quiet, heat haze - **Times of day:** dawn, noon, golden hour, dusk, blue hour, night Example: *brutalist mass at dusk* · *glass box less-is-more in fog* ### Botany & Birds - **Eras:** herbarium plate, Victorian, cyanotype age, mid-century, woodblock - **Materials:** watercolor, ink wash, linocut, collage, paper mosaic, tile - **Compositions:** specimen alone, bird-and-host, life cycle, field pair, dense jungle - **Seasons / light:** spring soft, summer blaze, autumn mute, winter spare, studio lamp - **Specimens:** seed, leaf, bloom, canopy, songbird, raptor, insect-on-plant Example: *Audubon study in cyanotype* · *pressed plant specimen in autumn mute* ### Educational Explainers - **Subjects:** earth layers, water cycle, heart, circuit, food web, city inputs - **Diagram types:** blueprint, cutaway, cross-section, exploded, schematic, pictogram - **Audiences:** kid how-it-works, textbook calm, journal figure, museum panel - **Color systems:** white-line blue, neon outline, muted ink, primary ISOTYPE Example: *heart chambers as peeled-open cutaway for textbook calm* ### Layout Design - **Grid systems:** single column, two-up, modular 2×3, five-column fine, broken grid - **Type pairings:** Swiss quiet sans, bold cutout display, experimental layered type - **Paper stocks:** newsprint, coated white, kraft, letterpress tooth - **Scales:** postcard, poster, wall wayfinding, book cover, card deck Example: *nested color squares on kraft at poster scale* ### Children's book illustration - **Moods:** whimsical, cozy, adventurous, gentle night - **Looks:** storybook watercolor, flat editorial, soft collage - **Cast:** animals, kids, toys, weather helpers ### Concept art - **Scales:** character, vehicle, environment, establishing shot - **Worlds:** spacecraft, alien terrain, ruined megacity, soft sci-fi - **Finishes:** paintover, keyframe, material study ### Product design - **Stages:** napkin sketch, orthographic drawing, exploded schematic, hero render - **Materials:** plastic, metal, wood, fabric, glass - **Views:** three-quarter, top, section, detail callout ### Cartography - **Types:** terrain, city plan, fantasy atlas, transit diagram - **Textures:** ink contour, hypsometric tint, parchment, clean GIS - **Elements:** legend, compass, route, place labels --- ## 8. Style page layout Each style page is dominated by a **visually rich rendering**, then: - A few sentences of the **prompt** that created that visual style (as displayed on the page) - A couple of **keyword pairs** left for inspiration (from that book’s vocabulary) - An **ID number** for referencing the entry in the digital catalog - **Two QR codes** (see below) Catalog name, humanized rename, and one-line look sit with the prompt so the page stays scannable at arm’s length. At the back of each book (or the set): a **master variation index** — all keyword pairs in one place for fast madlibs across styles. --- ## 9. Dual QR codes per page Every full style page carries **two QR codes**: 1. **Payload QR** — encodes the **prompt text on that page** (the style prompt as displayed). Scan with a phone to grab and edit the prompt digitally. 2. **Source QR** — a small code linking to the **specific catalog page** the style was crawled from (Midlibrary or peer). Replaces long URLs and seed strings in print so readers can return to the origin and review it. Featured-gallery thumbs use a **single QR** to the digital catalog entry (named source + archive), not the dual pair. --- ## 10. Five pages of harvested renderings (visual inspiration) Each book includes about **five pages** of **distinct harvested renderings** found in the wild (Twitter/X and similar) — finished work that shows prompt magic outside the lab, including possible architect-specific looks. - **Digital versions** carry **full attribution**. - **Printed version** is for **private use** and stays light, with a **footnote** pointing readers to the digital catalog for attribution. These pages sit in the tight-grid inspiration allotment alongside hot keywords, views, and the featured gallery. --- ## 11. Madlib concept **Stem** = core style (humanized or catalog name) **Variables** = location / era / material / view / audience / grid words from the vocab Pattern: `[style stem] + [one view/era/material] + [one place/season/audience/scale]` Examples: - *quiet concrete and light* + *courtyard* + *blue hour* - *pressed plant specimen page* + *cyanotype* + *winter spare* - *white-line blue plans* + *exploded* + *kid how-it-works* - *primary-color geometric school* + *broken grid* + *poster scale* The playground is the stem; the lab is swapping variables until something unlocks. The payload QR makes the current stem-plus-variables grab-and-go. --- --- ## 13. Print selection (deferred) All **eight** books are active in the digital catalog and deep crawl. Print comes later: after starring (up to ~30 per book) and proposing groupings, pick about **four** books for print teasers. The other four remain digital-first. Food and cuisine is **not** in the set. --- ## 14. Working principles - Real catalog styles only — no invented Midlibrary slugs. - Midlibrary first for named artist and movement pages; peers for poetic or unique gaps. - Per-source harvests stay pure-play and serially numbered; messiness later. - Star-and-nominate up to ~30 styles for deeper full spreads. - Link out via source QR; respect catalog terms (no hotlinking Midlibrary images without permission). - Eight books in the digital archive; about sixty print pages each for whichever four later go to print; digital stays maintained for all eight. - Gallery ID space vs style-page ID space left open. - Private-use print stays light on attribution; digital carries full credit for harvested wild work. - Mobile review board: controls in a drawer; Cloudflare pushes only when aligned. --- *Curated Style Guides / Prompt Lab / Playground.*