ai April 24, 2026 5 min read
Design Tokens as Prompt Anchors
When you hand a generative image model an adjective, it drifts. When you hand it your design-system tokens by exact hex, it stops drifting. The discipline we found after shipping it wrong once.
We shipped the first cut of our CMS image generator with preset language like "hand-drawn whiteboard sketch" and "muted red accent." The output was childish chalkboard stick figures — nothing like the pen-and-ink illustrations already on our blog. The fix was not a better adjective. It was the same move you use everywhere else in design: stop naming things with vibes, start naming things with tokens.
Eli Wood
CEO, Black Flag Design
