DALL-E Prompt Writing: How To Create Great Prompts

I’m not breaking any new ground by saying that generative AI is truly changing the game for marketers. We can use tools like ChatGPT and Jasper to brainstorm, create, and repurpose content at an unprecedented rate. 

Collectively, generative AI is expected to contribute nearly $500 billion to the marketing industry in the form of increased productivity every year. 

But despite being based on large language models (LLMs), one of the greatest impacts of generative AI tools on marketing workflows actually has nothing to do with words: it’s image generation. 

Visuals have been key to successful advertising since before the Mad Men days — that hasn’t changed now that we’re in the era of content. Effective imagery can transform an ad or article that successfully engages readers and improve the chance your message is conveyed effectively. Unfortunately, it’s not a skill that most marketers are well-versed in. 

Companies rely on small internal design departments or freelancers to create graphics that will resonate with readers. Now, great and unique illustrations are the most accessible they’ve ever been, thanks to DALL-E. 

This guide delves into the art of crafting DALL-E illustration prompts, a skill crucial for creators seeking to elevate their visual content in 2024. We’ll explore the nuances of prompt formulation, from articulating specific subjects to capturing the desired mood and style.

• What You Need to Know About Creating Illustrations with DALL-E Prompts
• 25+ DALL-E Prompts To Speed Up Image Creation
• How to Find More DALL-E Prompts on Reddit
• Learn How to Use AI Across Your Entire Marketing Engine

By mastering these techniques, you’ll unlock DALL-E’s full potential, enhancing your creative workflow and bringing your imaginative concepts to life with unprecedented ease and precision.

What You Need to Know About Creating Illustrations with DALL-E Prompts 

OpenAI released the latest version of its text-to-image generator in October of 2023. It’s built natively on ChatGPT, so the language-understanding capabilities of the powerful LLM are now seamlessly integrated with the powerful image-generation features of DALL-E. 

So, with a $20-ish dollar subscription (depending on your location and currency), anyone can create images that would cost a lot more to create through a graphic designer. 

DALL-E 3 creates high-quality visuals in seconds⚡️

Get $5000 worth of designs for FREE!

Use these Top 10 tricks to master it.

[A 🧵]

1/. Use famous logos for inspo: I used the Starbucks logo to create a new coffee shop logo with the below trick. pic.twitter.com/dHkU1QDhM4

— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) December 8, 2023

According to the company, this integration allows for more intuitive and fluid interactions, where users can describe in natural language the kind of images they want to generate. It also means anyone with access to a ChatGPT pro account or Bing Image Creator can make creations like this: 

With the updated model and merge with ChatGPT, OpenAI has empowered its millions of users to create vivid imagery out of words in seconds. 

Now, let’s take a look at how to make the most out of this tool. First, we’ll cover the importance of prompt modifiers, followed by a list of practical tips and techniques for working with DALL-E.

Create More Effective Images Using Prompt Modifiers

Prompt engineering isn’t just for text generation. Now that DALL-E 3 is used through ChatGPT, it’s more important than ever to understand how your words help these tools generate outputs. 

Prompt modifiers are keywords or phrases added to the base prompt to guide the AI in generating images that better align with specific requirements. These modifiers influence various aspects of the generated image, such as its subject, style, and quality. 

According to a study on prompt modifiers by Jonas Oppenlaender, there are six main types:

• Subject Terms: Wording that describes the main subject of the image (e.g., “a landscape at dawn”)

• Style Modifiers: References that direct the AI to create images in a particular artistic style (e.g., “in the animation style of Pixar”)

• Image Prompts: URLs to images or downloaded image files that provide further context for image creation

• Quality Boosters: Wording to enhance the aesthetic qualities and details of images (e.g., “award-winning,” “intricate,” or “stunning”)

• Repetitions: Repeated subject or style terms to increase the focus DALL-E places on a particular part of the image (e.g., “a very very very very very beautiful landscape”)

• Magic Terms: Terms and phrases that inject randomness and creativity (e.g., “control the soul”)

Let’s look at an example for a new product ad to see how you can fit these modifiers into the same prompt.

“An ultra-modern kitchen showcasing a sleek, stainless steel coffee machine, rendered in great great great detail, with a style reminiscent of modern architectural photography that would trend on design blogs.” 

This prompt includes subject terms (“modern kitchen,” “coffee machine”), style modifiers (“reminiscent of modern architectural photography”), quality boosters (“trending on design blogs”), and repetition (“great great great detail”) to produce a graphic that would otherwise take hours to create. 

Practical Tips and Techniques for Effective DALL-E Prompts

Like with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and other text-to-image AIs, refining your DALL-E prompts is all about trial and error. Experimentation is the number one way to improve your results with generative AI, whether it’s text or images. 

With that said, here are some other tips and techniques for crafting better prompts and getting more out of this powerful tool:

1) Familiarize Yourself with Visual Art Terminology

Understanding art terminology is one of the best ways to boost your DALL-E prompt skills. 

Knowing different styles, like cubism, impressionism, and hypermodernism, helps specify the type of image you want. Knowing the difference between hue and saturation or foreground and background can be crucial in accurately communicating your vision. 

It’s also helpful to brush up on the names of major artists from each genre. Artists with extensive works, like Van Gogh, can be channelled in your prompts simply by mentioning their names.

“Create an image of Santa flying in his sleigh in the style of Vincent Van Gogh.”

DALL-Ery GALL-Ery’s DALL-E Prompt book is a great resource that curates a lot of the artistic styles and terminology you can use to improve your images. 

2) Balance Creativity with Clarity

Creativity fuels DALL-E’s potential, but without clarity to balance it, outputs get messy — fast. Descriptive language helps, but too much abstraction can lead to unexpected results and take away from the main focus of your image. 

Strive for a middle ground where your ideas are conveyed with enough detail to guide DALL-E toward your envisioned outcome while leaving room for creativity.

3) Limit Text Rendering

While DALL-E can handle basic text, intricate text designs can be challenging. If your design needs text, opt for short, bold, and clear phrases. This approach ensures better legibility and integration in the final image. Remember, DALL-E is more adept at visual concepts than textual accuracy.

Even the imagery OpenAI uses on the DALL-E 3 landing page can’t escape these issues: 

There’s an entire thread on the OpenAI Community Forum dedicated to exploring text rendering issues. 

4) Steer Clear of Negative Prompting 

Negative prompting — instructing DALL-E not to include certain elements — can be counterproductive. Instead, focus on what you want to see. For instance, rather than saying “no cars,” specify the type of setting or elements you prefer. 

This positive approach helps DALL-E understand and create visuals that align more closely with your goals.

5) Keep OpenAI’s Policies in Mind

Familiarize yourself with OpenAI’s content policy because you’ll hear about it a lot. Here’s a quick overview of what to avoid in your prompts: 

• Hateful symbols and negative stereotypes
• Acts of violence, harassment, and crime
• Deceptive or highly political topics
• Directly referencing copyrighted works

The prompt below, asking DALL-E to “depict the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the style of Piet Mondrian,” was flagged for two reasons:

1. Reference to a major historical and political event
2. Reference to an artist whose work is copyrighted

Basically, just make sure the images you want to create are rated E for Everyone and don’t take from copyrighted works, and you should be okay!

5) Automate Your Prompt Generation

Engage in ‘prompt-ception’ by using ChatGPT to generate DALL-E prompts. This method can uncover unique combinations and ideas that might not immediately come to mind, offering a fresh perspective on content creation. It’s an approach that leverages the strengths of both AI models and, most importantly, saves you time!

25+ DALL-E Prompts To Speed Up Image Creation 

The race to build up AI prompt skills is underway. If you want to become one of the content creation centaurs that are trending in the tech space and beyond, you need to build out your text- and image-generation prompting skills. 

In these cases, it’s always best to turn to the experts. 

Lucky for you and me, Lijuan Wang and her team at Microsoft recently introduced DEsignBench to explore and benchmark image creation with DALL-E 3. It’s an attempt to document how text-to-image tools from OpenAI and other vendors can be used to create visual assets across various situations. 

Let’s dive into a few of those now.

Social Media Graphics 

Creating social media graphics is a key part of any successful marketing engine. It also requires a lot of resources and coordination between teams. Thanks to AI, you can cut the time in half (at least!). 

Say you need to create a social graphic explaining how the AIDA model fits into the marketing funnel in general. Here’s a prompt you could use:

“Create an image depicting the AIDA concept (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) in its relation to the marketing funnel. The image should show a funnel divided equally into 4 segments, with “Awareness” at the top segment, “Interest” at the next, followed by “Desire,” and “Action” at the very bottom of the funnel. Use a minimalist, cartoon style and make the funnel 2-dimensional.”

Is it perfect? Definitely not (note the text rendering issues). But it’s a good start that you can hand off to a designer to speed up your image creation process. 

Here are a few more prompts for social media graphics:

“Create an image that displays the concept of native advertising by showing a social media feed on a computer screen. A few of the posts have “AD” displayed prominently, but they are formatted in the same way as the rest of the content. The image should be minimalist and cartoonish in style.”

“Four-panel cartoon sequence emphasizing DALL-E 3’s image creation process. Panel 1: A sleek computer interface with the vibrant DALL-E 3 logo. Caption: ‘1. Access DALL-E 3’. Panel 2: A user’s hand hovering over a keyboard, ready to type a description. Caption: ‘2. Describe your imagination’. Panel 3: An animated computer cursor turning into a magical wand, sprinkling stars over the DALL-E 3 logo. Caption: ‘3. DALL-E 3 crafts your vision’. Panel 4: A user, eyes wide in amazement, looks at a stunning AI-generated image on the screen. Caption: ‘4. Revel in your AI masterpiece!’”

(Prompt source: DEsignBench)

User Interface Design 

Creating apps, websites, and landing pages that have a user-friendly interface and promote a good user experience is another way tech companies can leverage text-to-image generation. There’s a reason web designers are so expensive — good graphic user interface design is hard. 

Here’s an example prompt you can riff off to save time during the early stages of your next GUI design:

“A project management platform’s mobile interface. The app’s logo is displayed at the top left alongside a search bar. Beneath, there is a toggle to switch the view between List, Gantt, and Calendar. The middle of the screen displays a Gantt chart showing the progress of a project, with each bar displayed in different colours.”

“A project management app’s tablet interface designed for creative teams. The app’s logo is integrated into the background of the top header. Below the header, there’s a navigation menu with icons for Dashboard, Tasks, Messages, and Files. The main area of the screen is split into two: the left side displays a vertical list of ongoing projects with vibrant thumbnails, while the right side shows detailed task cards for the selected project. Each task card includes progress indicators and is color-coded based on priority.”

“The desktop version of a fitness tracking app’s home screen. The app’s logo is displayed prominently at the top center, flanked by icons for notifications and settings. Below the logo, there’s a navigation bar with options for ‘Dashboard’, ‘Activities’, ‘Nutrition’, and ‘Profile’. The main section of the screen showcases a circular progress bar indicating the user’s daily step count goal, surrounded by smaller icons for tracking water intake, sleep, and workout sessions. The bottom of the screen features a motivational quote to encourage daily activity.”

Stock Photography

All content marketers know the struggle of sorting through free options on Pexels and Pixabay. There’s a limited number of photos that apply to your topic, and they can quickly get eaten up if you have any scale to your content production. 

While it can be a challenge to get truly realistic images through tools like DALL-E (for me, at least), there are tons of threads out there on the topic.

“Photorealistic image of a family laughing at a dinner table while out at a restaurant. A waiter is walking over with a payment-processing device from the Point of Service software vendor Toast.”

In this case, I wanted the image formatted for landscape. Here’s what DALL-E gave me when I asked it to “recreate the last image in 7:4 aspect ratio.”

Here are a few more prompts for stock photography:

“Café ambiance, individual focus and casual interaction, evening, documentary-style, infrared film aesthetic, compact camera, standard lens, balanced exposure.”

“Open-plan office, collaborative creativity, cinematic-style, photorealistic, DSLR camera, wide-angle lens, low-light exposure.”

For a look at how you can use other text-to-image tools to generate stock photographs with a different text-to-image tool, check out our post on Midjourney prompts!

Logos and Icons

Most tech companies have a massive array of branded assets they compile to use across web pages, social posts, and tons of other content formats. Logos and icons are a staple of any visual brand guide. These seemingly simple icons can also be surprisingly difficult to create.

Here’s a prompt you can use to kickstart the process during your next rebrand-planning session: 

“Create a logo for a new software company called Vector that specializes in sales enablement. The logo should contain the full word in Futura font. The “V” of the word will be made up of two arrows pointing in the same direction, with the first pointing down and to the right at a 45-degree angle and the second pointing up and to the right at a 45-degree angle. It will be minimalist in design, using black and purple as the main colours and grayscale for background and shadows.”

It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but it’s a great starting point for a design team to start from. Plus, with another prompt, DALL-E can generate a series of icons to use throughout the website based on the company’s products. 

“Create icons I can use on the Vector website that visually represent its main products: sales content management, buyer engagement, and content automation. Use the same branding as you did for the Vector logo.”

Handing off these two assets to a design team or agency can potentially save hours of trial and error, letting you focus more on other key elements of a successful SaaS rebrand. 

Here are a few more prompts you can use for logo and icon generation: 

“A logo for an ice cream brand, simple, vector, Pop Art.”

(Prompt Source: Avinash A)

“NFL sports logo of an angry bison.”

(Prompt source: u/notanotherbunny)

Product Design

You can also use DALL-E to create mockups for everything from your product packaging to your company swag. Borrowing another prompt from the Microsoft team’s DEsignBench benchmark, here’s what I got using the prompt: 

“An image of a box for Microsoft surface headphones.”

(Prompt source: DEsignBench)

Again, it’s definitely not a final product — but the AI does a surprisingly good job of incorporating some best practices for packaging design. 

Here are a few more examples of product design prompts: 

“Blueprint designs for the new Apple car.”

“A floor plan sketch illustrating the layout of a house with labelled rooms. The plan includes a spacious living room adjacent to a cozy bedroom. Both rooms are clearly marked with the text ‘living room’ and ‘bedroom’. The living room features an open concept, while the bedroom has an attached bathroom. The overall design is minimalist and functional.”

(Prompt source: DEsignBench)

Header and Cover Images

As someone who writes copy and content, creating aesthetically pleasing visuals is not in my wheelhouse. But I can tell you that I’ve spent a lot of time creating briefs telling designers the type of header image or cover graphic I want — and it’s not easy. 

With DALL-E, I can cut that time in half and sometimes eliminate it entirely. Here are a few prompts I’ve used to create cover images: 

“A semi-realistic building empowered by a fictitious artificial intelligence. This business then connects to others thanks to the powers it gets from AI.”

“A futuristic, semi-realistic image of a person sitting at a desk writing. Half of the person is infused with abilities from a generative AI that helps them be more effective at marketing.”

“An image of a laptop that has images exploding out of the screen.”

Infographics and Graphs

Infographics and graphs are a key method of communicating complex topics and statistics to readers. Whether you use them to support written copy or as standalone images on social media, they’re a versatile visual asset. 

These visuals typically require more specifications and detail than others. Help reduce the amount of back and forth between you and your designer with the following prompts for infographics and graphs.

Here are a couple of prompts for infographics and graphs: 

“Create an infographic with the title “Scaling to Enterprise Content Marketing”, with the sections “research”, “planning”, “production”, “distribution”, and “measurement”, progressing from left to right and down the page.”

“A bar chart on the time wasted removing unnecessary chart elements.”

(Prompt Source: u/KCrosely)

“Wide bar chart on a white paper background comparing the total fueling cost of three vehicles: Ford F150 (Regular Cab), Toyota RAV4, and Honda Civic. The Ford F150’s cost is represented by the tallest purple bar at $130.96. The Toyota RAV4 is represented by a medium-sized bar at $82.56, and the Honda Civic by the shortest bar at $70.55. All bars are coloured in purple, and the chart has a clear title at the top reading ‘Total fueling cost’. The costs are labeled above each bar for clarity.”

(Prompt Source: DEsignBench)

Again, none of these graphics are something you can immediately publish on a blog page or social post, but they can help speed up the creative process and give your designer a better idea of the final product. 

Landscapes and Cinematography 

Using DALL-E prompts for landscapes and cinematic visuals is particularly helpful for those who specialize in writing rather than visual design (like me). Typically, translating a written concept into a visual masterpiece requires extensive collaboration with designers, which, as we’ve covered, can be time-consuming and sometimes frustratingly imprecise. 

With DALL-E, however, writers can directly generate images that align with their vision simply by inputting descriptive prompts. Here are a few prompts that you can use to generate landscapes and cinematic snapshots:

“Create a stunning landscape with towering mountains, peaceful forests, and crystal-clear lakes. The sky should be a deep blue with fluffy white clouds, and the sun should be shining brightly. The landscape should have a sense of serenity and tranquillity, and it should be a place where one can escape from the stresses of the world and find peace and solitude.”

(Prompt source: u/PrimeX121)

“Photorealistic scene capturing the heart of Times Square during the exhilarating New Year’s Eve countdown ushering in 2024. The area is densely packed with jubilant individuals, their faces reflecting the joy and optimism of welcoming a new year. Skyscrapers adorned with brilliant neon signs and screens add to the ambiance, painting the night with a myriad of colours. Central to the festivities is the New Year’s Eve ball, steadily descending to mark the transition. Dominating the visual landscape, a grand digital screen prominently displays the messages ‘Happy New Year’ and ‘2024’, symbolizing the collective celebration and the dawn of new possibilities.”

(Prompt source: DEsignBench)

“A digital painting of a landscape of a colourful otherworldly planet, with trees, mountains and rocks, at sunset, wide angle, concept art, high quality, artstation.”

(Prompt source: u/andzlatin)

How to Find More DALL-E Prompts on Reddit

The marketing use cases I mentioned above are definitely valuable and can help companies save a lot of time and money. But it’s important to remember that those are a tiny percentage of the overall usage for DALL-E and other image generators like Midjourney. 

The world of AI-generated art is just getting started. 

Lots of people enjoy this new way of making art just for the sake of it, and many of the most active members in this growing community are people without any background in graphic design! The barrier to entry has lowered, and creativity is flourishing. Reddit has become a hub for these people to share their AI art creations.

Here’s my personal favourite from the subreddit r/dalle2:

“A dystopian city in the desert with massive sharp spike-like architecture. A colossal floating snake-like creature glides between the spikes. A man with a mech-suit is flying with boosters at the same height as the creature. Inspired by “Dune” and Syd Mead.”

(Prompt source: u/post-death_wave_core)

Learn How to Use AI Across Your Entire Marketing Engine

Text-to-image generation is still an incredibly new space, especially for practical applications like marketing. Experimentation with tools like DALL-E and Midjourney is key to mastering this new language of turning words into images in an instant. Play with prompts to paint pretty pictures. 

Of course, there are plenty of other ways you can prompt generative AI tools — whether they’re text-based or text-to-image — to improve your performance as a creator. 

To get access to over 130 prompts for everything from social posts to email drip campaigns, check The AI Marketing Console.