Creative — Explore (Visual Direction)

Converge on ONE visual direction before spending generation budget on variations. Picking a direction early is the single highest-leverage creative decision — everything downstream (scenes, shots, ads, polish) inherits it. Never jump straight to final assets without a locked direction.

When to use

• Starting a new brand, campaign, or product visual from scratch.
• The user has a product but no agreed "look".
• Stakeholders disagree on aesthetic and you need concrete options to react to.
• Before creative-scene, creative-shot, creative-ads-explorer, or creative-offer when no direction is locked.

When NOT to use

• A direction/brand guide already exists → skip to the asset skills.
• You only need to finish one already-chosen image → creative-polish.
• The user wants team-wide mood alignment with territories → creative-moodboard (broader than this).

Inputs to gather (ask only what's missing)

• Product / brand + what it does, in one line.
• Audience + the feeling it should evoke (trust? excitement? calm?).
• Hard constraints: locked colors, logo, fonts, explicit do-nots.
• Medium: web hero, paid ad, packaging, social, app store.

If the user can't answer "what feeling", propose 2-3 candidate feelings and let them pick — don't stall.

Workflow

1. Diverge on directions. Propose 3-6 named directions. Each must differ in organizing principle, not just palette. For each: name, one-line vibe, palette, typography feel, photographic/illustration style, when it wins, when it fails.
2. Write a reusable prompt stub per direction, structured scene/backdrop → subject → details → constraints. This stub is the DNA that downstream skills reuse for consistency.
3. Generate ONE reference image per direction with your image-generation tool (any text-to-image backend: DALL·E, Imagen, FLUX, SD, Midjourney). Keep it small/fast (1024x1024). Save to ./creative/explore/<direction>.png.
4. Present side by side with the rationale table. Make a recommendation tied to the audience + medium.
5. Lock one (or fuse two). Hand the locked direction + prompt stub to the next skill.

Worked example

Request: "We sell a $180 ceramic pour-over kettle. Need a look for the site hero."

## Direction A — "Quiet Luxury"
vibe: restrained, gallery-like, lets the object breathe
palette: bone white / warm grey / single matte-black accent
type: high-contrast serif display + grotesk body
style: soft north-window light, shallow DOF, seamless backdrop
wins when: price is the message (premium, trust-first)
fails when: audience is young/playful — reads cold
stub: "seamless bone backdrop -> kettle 3/4 center -> soft window light, matte black accent, 85mm f2 -> minimal, no props, no text"
[ref: ./creative/explore/quiet-luxury.png]

## Direction B — "Warm Ritual"
vibe: hands, steam, morning — the feeling of using it
palette: amber / cream / oxblood   type: humanist serif
style: golden-hour 35mm, lifestyle, real texture
wins when: selling the experience, social-first
fails when: needs to look clinical/spec-driven
stub: "wood counter, morning light -> hands pouring with kettle, steam -> 35mm, warm grade -> candid, real"
[ref: ./creative/explore/warm-ritual.png]

Recommendation: A for the hero (price-led, trust), keep B's stub for social. → lock A, pass stub to creative-shot.

Quality bar (don't ship until)

• Directions are genuinely distinct — a stranger could tell them apart blind.
• Each has an explicit "wins when / fails when" so the choice is reasoned, not vibes.
• Exactly one reference image per direction at this stage (no premature iteration).
• The locked stub is concrete enough that another skill can reuse it verbatim.

Common pitfalls

• Six shades of the same idea — if they share palette + style, they're one direction. Force structural difference.
• Over-generating — one image per direction. Iterate AFTER selection, not before.
• Inventing brand constraints the user never stated — mark every assumption explicitly.
• Skipping the stub — without it, downstream skills drift and the set looks incoherent.

Handoff

Locked direction + prompt stub → creative-scene (lifestyle), creative-shot (PDP set), creative-ads-explorer (ad batch), creative-offer (promo), or creative-moodboard (expand to territories).

Tooling

Requires a text-to-image tool. If none is available, deliver the named directions + prompt stubs and ask the user to run them, then resume at selection.