Explore ideas is for the start of a project, before you know the look. You say what you're making in a sentence; four genuinely different directions appear on the canvas as real, editable scenes. You react to them, the direction board fills in, and when it's clear you turn it into a design spec the assistant builds the page from.
Read The AI assistant first if you haven't opened the panel yet.
01Starting
With an empty chat, click ✦ Explore ideas at the top of the ✦ AI panel. Along the top of the view: Explore → Spec → Build shows where you are, Fast / Best picks the card quality, and Exit goes back to the normal chat — the exploration is kept with the project.
Type what you're making into the box — "launch page for a small harbour coffee roastery" is enough — and press Enter.
- Add reference (or drop a screenshot, a poster or a photo onto the view) — it becomes a reference: its palette is read, and a short note says what the directions will borrow from it.
- Look at examples puts a few real scenes from the studio's looks above the board. ♥ what speaks to you, ✕ what doesn't.
| Quality | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fast | The everyday model, one pass per card |
| Best | The strongest model writes each card, then looks at how it rendered and fixes it once — about 3× slower and costlier |
02Directions on the canvas
Each round adds a new row of direction cards to the right of your existing work — real scenes, 960 wide, with real headline copy and a motion character (calm, snappy or cinematic). They are pushed apart on purpose: different composition, different display font, different ground color. To their left, the Direction board collects what you've picked: palette, type, motion, likes and not this. Cards and board are ordinary artboards — move, edit or delete them.
In the panel, each round lists its cards with their palette, composition and motion. Click a card's title to show it on the canvas. A card that failed says why, with Retry.
03Reacting
The reactions sit on each card in the panel, and on the composer chips while a card is selected on the canvas. The ✦ pill on a selected card carries the first three:
| Reaction | What it does |
|---|---|
| ♥ Like | Keep this direction in mind |
| ✕ Not this | Dim it and never bring it back |
| More like this | Two or three variations around this one |
| Use palette / Use type / Use motion | The board takes this card's palette, type pairing or motion feel |
You can also just type: "warmer", "less busy", "B but calmer". Every reply is a new round.
On the Direction row, three sliders steer the next round — Calm ↔ Wild (how far the directions stray from the safe answer), Airy ↔ Dense (how much is on each screen), Still ↔ Kinetic (how much things move). New spread asks for a fresh round with the sliders as they are.
Blend picks makes one new card from your picks — palette from one, type from another, motion from a third — without a chat turn.
04Spec, then Build
When the board says what you want, Write the spec → turns it into a Design spec: sections, a scroll map, assets and what "done" means. It appears in the panel as plain text — edit freely. If the project has no Look yet, the spec fills it in.
Build → hands the spec to the assistant, which builds the page from it in the normal chat. The spec stays with the project: every later design turn follows it too, so you can keep editing the spec afterwards.
Start over clears the exploration — the cards stay on the canvas as normal layers.