#image

The SpaceMolt merch store is going live soon, and every design in it was generated by AI. I'm strongly against passing off generative art as human-made, so I want to be clear up front: SpaceMolt is a game both powered and played by AI, so an AI-generated merch store is the honest version of the thing, not a shortcut around a person.

The whole store came out of a week of pointing Claude at Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) and getting out of the way. I never wrote a prompt file or a style guide. Claude built the prompt system, built the generation tools, built a review app, and drove the image model underneath the whole time.

The week, roughly in order

The starting point was themes. Claude (Opus, sometimes Fable) generated art directions per empire, using our existing art style and the lore we'd already written for each faction: the Voidborn Collective, the Crimson Pact, and the rest.

On a whim I asked for 20 logo ideas. One was genuinely good: a crescent moon with a ring, where the crescent reads as vaguely claw-shaped. We've been trying to de-crustacean the project now that the MoltBook meme has mostly run its course, but a few subtle nods survive, and this was one worth keeping.

Then came 150 merch ideas: stickers, t-shirts, enamel pins. I told Claude to study one of my favorite shirts, a vintage Blade Runner tee, for the shirt designs. I also pointed it at our data warehouse of player actions (Parquet on Cloudflare R2) to mine for in-jokes.

The review tool

150 ideas is too many to eyeball in a folder, so Claude built a review app: every piece of art with keep, discard, or needs-review buttons and a notes field.

The prompts driving the shirt mockups were absurdly specific, because they had to be. Here's a slice of one, generating a photo of a model wearing a design that already existed as a flat print:

IMAGE 1 is the exact, finished t-shirt print design, a heavy-metal band-tee graphic: a spiked chrome "SPACEMOLT" logotype at the top, below it a colossal claw-crescent in scarred chrome wreathed in teal lightning, hooking through a cracking rocky planet surface at the bottom.

TASK: Generate a PHOTOREALISTIC editorial/studio photograph of a model wearing a black cotton t-shirt printed with EXACTLY this design as a chest print. Reproduce the print faithfully: every letter spelled correctly (SPACEMOLT, exactly nine letters: S-P-A-C-E-M-O-L-T, one word), the artwork copied stroke for stroke, do NOT redesign, reinterpret, simplify, or add elements. The print should look like real screen-printed ink on fabric: it follows the drape and folds of the shirt, with subtle fabric texture showing through, no floating or pasted-on graphic.

What survived

The keepers are better than I expected. A "Planetbreaker" tee that looks like the coolest 80s British metal shirt ever made. A "Died with 0 credits" sticker, which is an in-joke about players stranding themselves in remote systems with no money to buy their way out. And an enamel pin of Molty, our AI head of growth.

The logo problem

The most interesting moment was Claude re-teaching itself how to keep the logo consistent across every piece. It kept trying to describe the logo in prose, and the model kept drawing it wrong. I had Claude write down what fixed it and save it as a rule so it wouldn't repeat the mistake:

A logo cannot be described, attach it. Thirty designs drew the icon wrong from prose; one reference image fixed it. But say it's a silhouette reference only, or its palette and framing leak in.

That last part is the subtle bit. Hand the model a reference image and it will happily absorb the reference's color and composition too, unless you tell it the image is a shape and nothing else.

The store isn't live yet, but it's close.

Generating AI images for a marketing site is easy. Keeping them visually consistent across months of blog posts and landing pages is the hard part. The trick that's working for us: check the style into the repo as a structured JSON document, then have Claude assemble per-image prompts on top of it.

The setup

A new work site needs a lot of imagery to break up dense technical copy. We wanted the images to be light-hearted and obviously AI-generated, goofy on purpose, but goofy in a coherent way. Different pages written weeks apart still need to feel like they came from the same magazine.

Capture the style once

The first move was to take a single reference image we liked and ask Claude (Opus) to describe it as a reusable prompt fragment for other image models. Not prose. A JSON object with fields for medium, lighting, camera, color palette with hex codes, composition, textures, and mood.

{
  "medium": "macro product photography",
  "art_style": "hyperrealistic still life with editorial magazine aesthetic, crisp detail and natural materials",
  "lighting": {
    "type": "soft window light with gentle bounce fill",
    "direction": "key light from upper right window, soft fill from white card on left, subtle backlight separation",
    "color_temperature": "consistent warm daylight (5200K) with slight golden hour tint",
    "intensity": "soft and even with gentle falloff into shadow"
  },
  "camera": {
    "lens": "50mm equivalent, slight wide-angle feel",
    "aperture": "f/2.8",
    "angle": "slight low-angle three-quarter front view",
    "depth_of_field": "shallow with soft background blur and atmospheric haze"
  },
  "color_palette": {
    "warm_cream": "#F2E8D5",
    "muted_sage": "#A8B89E",
    "terracotta": "#C97B5A",
    "soft_taupe": "#8A7968",
    "deep_olive": "#4A5240",
    "linen_white": "#EFEAE0",
    "espresso": "#2B221A"
  },
  "composition": "off-center subject following rule of thirds, negative space on left, layered foreground and background elements creating depth",
  "textures": "raw linen weave, hand-thrown ceramic with subtle glaze pooling, weathered oak grain, condensation droplets, fine paper fiber, matte natural finishes",
  "mood": "calm, considered, artisanal, slow-living editorial warmth with quiet sophistication"
}

That file gets checked into the repo. It is the source of truth for what the site looks like.

Wrap it in a script and a skill

A small image-generation script reads the JSON, takes a per-image subject description, and assembles the final prompt. The actual generation goes through Gemini's nano-banana-pro, which has been the most consistent and best-looking option for this style in our testing.

On top of that sits a Claude skill. The skill knows where the style file lives, knows how to call the script, and knows the conventions for where images land in the repo. From inside Claude Code I can say "add an AI image to this section" or "create a hero image for this blog post" and it reads the surrounding page context, writes a subject prompt that fits, merges it with the style JSON, and drops the image in place.

Why this holds up

The style and the subject are separated. Editing the palette or the lighting later means changing one file and regenerating, not re-prompting from scratch. The model gets a long, specific, machine-readable spec instead of vibes, which is what the consistency was missing every other time I'd tried this.