One home, three shelves
The Library is the house’s curatorial home, arranged as three shelves: References, the canon; Inspiration, your board; Prompts, the handbook. One room, three ways of holding taste — what the culture has already proven, what your eye has been collecting, and what the tools have been taught to understand.
Only the shelf you are reading is loaded, and each is a destination in its own right. But the three are meant to be worked together: the canon gives you vocabulary, the board gives you appetite, and the handbook turns both into instructions a model will obey.
References: the canon
The References shelf holds more than sixteen hundred photographers, art directors, stylists and movements — the working canon of the visual culture the House operates in. It is built to be filtered, not browsed: narrow by discipline or register until you are looking at the handful of names your direction is actually in conversation with.
Then inject. A reference chosen here travels directly into your brief, where it does what references are for — it calibrates the engine’s register the way naming a photographer calibrates a crew’s. This is the difference between decorating a moodboard and directing with precedent.
Learn names beyond your defaults. Every director has eight references they reach for under pressure; the shelf exists so that number grows.
Inspiration: your board
The Inspiration shelf is your own eye, saved. Images you collect land here with their provenance and dates, and the shelf reads them as it files them — detecting the trends running through what you save and tagging each image with what it actually is: minimal, sculptural, monochrome, raw, urban, editorial.
The board is a launchpad, not a scrapbook. Any image can start a brief: its tags translate into the brief’s own fields — a sculptural tag becomes a desired emotion, an urban one becomes an environment — and you arrive in the Engine with the image’s character already composed as direction.
Watch your own tags over time. A board that keeps filling with the same three registers is telling you something about your taste that no client ever will.
Prompts: the handbook
The Prompts shelf is annotated prompt intelligence, organised by tool — Midjourney, Flux Pro, Runway, Stable Diffusion — with each entry pairing a working prompt with a note explaining why it works. The annotation is the product: why seventy per cent shadow forces a model off its default lighting, why a low stylize value stops decoration, why naming a photographer sets register without imitation.
Read the shelf the way you would read another director’s marked-up script. Copying the prompts will get you images; understanding the annotations will get you a method. The aim is that you eventually stop needing the handbook for the tools you use most — because its reasoning has become yours.
The canon plus your eye
Together the shelves are the house’s answer to the oldest problem in commercial image-making: taste is slow to build and easy to fake. The References shelf gives you the culture’s memory; the Inspiration shelf builds your own; the Prompts shelf makes both executable.
Use the Library before the Engine, not after. Ten minutes on the shelves before composing a brief is the cheapest quality improvement in the entire system — you arrive at the direction with precedent, appetite and technique already in hand.