Your first week with AI web graphics: a day-by-day checklist

The quickest way to get good at directing AI images is to finish one real page. Choose a live project, a client landing page or your own portfolio, and give it about an hour a day for a week.

Day 1: Decide the look

• Write the brand palette as three or four plain colour phrases.
• Choose one style: for example warm editorial photography, soft clay 3D or flat vector.
• Generate one grid of nine small objects in that style and palette. This is your look sheet.
• Get it approved by whoever signs off.

Day 2: Make the hero

• Write the headline and decide which side it sits on.
• Brief the hero in seven lines: subject, composition, lighting, material, palette, negative space, avoid.
• Run three rounds, changing one line each time.
• Place the headline on top and check it is readable.

Day 3: Make a matching set

• Generate one anchor illustration.
• In the same sitting, make three feature-card images with the anchor as the style reference where your tool supports one.
• View all four at small size. Fix the odd one out.

Day 4: Mockups

• Generate a front-on phone and a laptop on a desk, both with blank screens.
• Composite your real screenshots.
• Notice how much easier front-on and top-down angles are.

Day 5: Supporting pieces

• One soft background for a section.
• One divider or pattern.
• Test each behind real body text and lower the contrast if needed.

Day 6: Formats and repairs

• Recompose the hero as a square and as a vertical story. Do not crop.
• Take the image that annoyed you most and repair it: state the correct result, keep everything else the same.

Day 7: Examine and log

• Open every image at full size. Read every surface. Count everything countable.
• Check your image tool's current terms for commercial use on your plan.
• Log tool, plan, prompt, seed and edits for each image you will publish.
• List the image slots still empty on the page.

What you will have

One project's images in one consistent look, a record of how each was made, and a routine you can repeat on the next brief in half the time. You will also have a clear sense of where AI images need a human: text, hands, real products and anything a customer relies on.

Do not add a second style in week one. The urge to try everything is strong, and it is the fastest way back to a page that looks collected.

Pixvault's seven-day plan follows this same order, with the exact recipe numbers to run each day and a 26-slot shot list to track them.