How to Set Up Design Rules

Design Rules let you define permanent constraints that your AI always follows — no matter what prompt you use or what style you pick. Think of them as your brand's creative guardrails.

What are Design Rules?

Design Rules are plain-text instructions that get injected into every AI prompt automatically. They work alongside your styles and brand colors, but they're always active — even when you don't select a specific style.

Common use cases:

• Enforcing brand color restrictions ("never use orange")
• Controlling person placement ("always place the person on the right")
• Setting language preferences ("use German for all text")
• Protecting YouTube UI areas ("avoid the lower-right corner where the timestamp appears")
• Defining typography preferences ("always use bold, sans-serif fonts")

Setting Up Design Rules

1. Navigate to Settings in the left sidebar
2. Under Organization, click Design Rules (the brain icon)
3. Write your rules in the text area — one rule per line works best
4. Click Save design rules

Writing Effective Rules

Keep rules specific and actionable. The AI works best with clear, direct instructions.

Good rules

• "Never use orange or bright red — my competitor uses these colors"
• "Always place the person on the right side of the image"
• "Use German for all text, headlines, and UI elements on the thumbnail"
• "Keep the lower-right corner empty — YouTube puts the video duration there"
• "Slightly blur backgrounds and reduce saturation so the subject pops"
• "My brand colors are #1E40AF (blue) and #F59E0B (amber)"

Rules to avoid

• "Make it look good" — too vague for the AI to act on
• "Be creative" — doesn't give the AI a specific constraint
• Extremely long paragraphs — keep each rule to one or two sentences

How It Works Behind the Scenes

When you generate or edit a thumbnail, your design rules are appended to the AI prompt with an "IMPORTANT design rules" prefix. This means:

• Rules apply to new generations via the prompt enhancer
• Rules apply to Video to Thumbnail: every variation in the pack, with or without a brand, saved style, or Creative Direction. The AI also follows them when it writes the headlines
• Rules apply to edits made in the editor
• Rules work in addition to brand colors, styles, and AI learnings
• You can have up to 2,000 characters of rules

When instructions disagree

In Video to Thumbnail, the AI weighs your instructions in this order:

1. Fixed system rules always come first, and no text you write can change them:
   • Brand logo lock. The AI never draws a logo, badge, or mark. If your brand has a logo file, the exact file is added once after the image is made. A rule like "add our logo in the top-left corner" will not make the AI paint a logo or add a second one.
   • Face and real people. If you attach a Face, that face stays the main person. The real people from your video are never swapped for someone else.
   • Safety rules, such as keeping logos and lettering that appear in your video exact.
2. Creative Direction and Custom headline for this video come next. If something you write there directly contradicts a design rule (for example, the rule says "no red" and you ask for a red background), the AI follows what you wrote for this video, on that one point only. Every other rule still applies.
3. Design Rules come next. They override styles, brand colors, the video's colors, the automatic headline, and your Winning Formula.
4. Winning Formula and other automatic choices only fill in what's left.

Design Rules never change who appears in the thumbnail. If you attach a Face, that face stays the main person.

Tips

• Start with 3–5 rules and add more as you learn what works
• Be specific about colors using hex codes when possible
• Rules are shared across your entire organization
• You can update rules at any time — changes take effect on the next generation