Rulebook

Nine rules that survived thirty rounds and about two thousand prompts. Each rule is one sentence and three copyable prompts, cited by tag id into docs/prompts/exploration-log.txt. Proof images attach one keeper at a time, with the prompt captured at harvest.

R1One ink, then restraint

Pick one ink and commit: Prussian blue cyanotype on cream, phosphor green on near-black, or black on foxed cream with a single small red mark. Never navy plus gold, never rainbow by default. Color is the minority lane, not the house style.

flags: --s 150 --draft (chaos from the UI slider)

a vinyl record center label of a stained glass window's leaded seams catching sun, stark black-and-white with one tiny red, engraved "HERMES", thermal-receipt paper grain, faded emulsion --ar 1:1 --s 150 --draft

r30#17

a red fox pouncing through fresh snow, fine 18th-century intaglio line engraving, black on cream, one tiny red mark, wordmark "HERMES", dot-matrix printer banding on tractor-feed paper --ar 3:4 --s 150 --draft

r30#14

a mimic octopus rippling chromatophore patterns across a coral shelf, phosphor-green dot-matrix dithering with CRT scanlines on near-black, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", datamatrix micro-scan grid, hairline registration --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r30#11

R2Texture is the medium

Every image goes through a print or early-digital process: risograph misregistration, halftone rosette, Bayer dither, thermal-receipt grain, xerox degradation, CRT scanlines. Clean renders read as stock. When it looks too smooth, add one texture clause.

flags: --s 150 --draft

a desert varnish patina darkening a sandstone wall, chalk-and-charcoal sketch, in the style of Gustav Klimt — gold-leaf ornamentation, mosaic-like pattern fields, sensuous decorative line, wordmark "HERMES", thermal-receipt paper grain, faded emulsion --ar 3:2 --s 150 --draft

r30#60

a telegraph key mid-tap, sending a coded message, shallow depth of field with dreamy bokeh, in the style of Paul Klee — childlike geometric whimsy, textured color field, symbolic line, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", xerox photocopy degradation, toner speckle, high-contrast blowout --ar 3:2 --s 150 --draft

r30#59

a mountain goat balanced on a sheer cliff face, moonlit nocturne, in the style of Francisco Goya — dark satirical etching, grotesque social critique, stark chiaroscuro, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", ordered Bayer dithering, low-bit indexed color --ar 1:1 --s 150 --draft

r30#57

R3Statuary in, living faces out

No photographic or living human faces. Classical marble statuary, busts, reliefs, and caryatids are approved as art objects: gods in the machine, glitched into dither. Machine habitat, not portraiture.

flags: --s 150 --draft

a shattered marble bust of Apollo, phosphor-green dot-matrix dithering with CRT scanlines on near-black, wordmark "HERMES" --ar 3:4 --s 150 --draft

r29#23

an ultraviolet fluorescence capture of a winged Nike victory statue, electric green and violet fluorescence on near-black, monospace HUD label "NOUS RESEARCH" --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r29#13

Mannerist etching of battle and hunt scenes, dense energetic composition rendering of an ultraviolet fluorescence capture of a winged Nike victory statue, electric green and violet fluorescence on near-black, "NOUS RESEARCH" --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r28#230

R4Only the real lexicon

Text stays anchored to words Nous actually uses: NOUS RESEARCH and HERMES first, project names rarely. Latin letters only, no invented slogans, no Greek script. Match the word to the subject: a bazaar can say open source, a cathedral cannot.

flags: --s 150 --draft

a sun pillar rising above a frozen horizon, baroque maximalist density, in the style of Emma Kunz — pendulum grid-field drawings on graph paper, radial symmetry, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", VHS tracking artifacts, chromatic aberration, analog noise --ar 3:2 --s 150 --draft

r30#58

in the style of Romeyn de Hooghe — Dutch Baroque etching, propagandistic dense allegorical satire — depicting a pulsar's lighthouse beam sweeping through space, terracotta and sand, sun-baked, wordmark "HERMES", ordered Bayer dithering, low-bit indexed color --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r30#51

in the style of Yohji Yamamoto — ink-black asymmetry, calligraphic void, matte cloth — depicting a swarm of drones forming "NOUS" over a sleeping city, olive and ochre with black, wordmark "HERMES", datamatrix micro-scan grid, hairline registration --ar 5:4 --s 150 --draft

r30#50

R5Neoclassical meets machine habitat

Subjects fuse the classical and the computational: colonnades dissolving into server racks, brutalist compute-cathedrals, cartouches, orreries, blueprint schematics. Scenes beat diagrams; keep labeled-diagram prompts under a third of any batch.

flags: --s 150 --draft

a Corinthian capital fused with circuit traces, thermal-receipt grain, warm-grey duotone halftone, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH" --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r29#32

a Doric colonnade dissolving into server racks, thermal-receipt grain, warm-grey duotone halftone, wordmark "HERMES" --ar 3:2 --s 150 --draft

r29#21

a laurel wreath and acanthus cartouche, black-ink letterpress on foxed cream, ornament rules, wordmark "LANGUAGE MODELS" --ar 2:3 --s 150 --draft

r29#20

R6The spectral break

The deliberate break from print texture is false-color sensor imagery: FLIR thermal, Aerochrome infrared, UV fluorescence, X-ray, night vision, schlieren, lidar. Wordmarks become HUD labels and scale bars. Moodboard grain reads as sensor noise here, so keep it on.

flags: --s 150 --draft, moodboard hermes on

Spanish Luminism, sun-dazzled beach scenes, dazzling light on water rendering of a color-schlieren capture of an ice cave's blue interior lit by a single shaft, rainbow refractive-index gradients on black, "HERMES", screenprint halftone with slight ink bleed and paper tooth --ar 3:2 --s 150 --draft

r30#42

Vignelli/Unimark rationalism, Helvetica, tight modular grid, red-black rendering of a lidar point-cloud scan of a total solar eclipse with the corona blazing, glowing false-color depth-gradient points in a black void, "NOUS RESEARCH", risograph misregistration, ink texture, off-register color --ar 16:9 --s 150 --draft

r30#41

color-chart grid, or grey squeegee blur rendering of a gen-3 night-vision capture of a whale shark gliding through a curtain of plankton, phosphor-green intensified image, circular vignette, IR bloom, "HERMES", screenprint halftone with slight ink bleed and paper tooth --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r30#40

R7Setup on Midjourney 8.2

Personalize on with Personalization profile #1 and the hermes moodboard both checked; confirm both tags on the job card. Draft mode on. Chaos and weird from the UI, never in the prompt. No --sref on the classical lane, and --sw is dead while any moodboard is attached: stack references to dilute instead.

flags: --ar <ratio> --s 150 --draft

in the style of Henri Matisse cut-outs — bold organic paper-cutout shapes, flat jewel and pastel color, white ground — depicting a loom weaving a vast tapestry of thread, oxblood and gold on cream, no text, purely visual --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft

r28#29

in the style of Stefan Sagmeister — hand-made object-typography, provocation, tactile lettering — depicting a row of caryatid columns, rust and forest-green, warm earth, no text, purely visual --ar 1:1 --s 150 --draft

r28#28

in the style of Johannes Vermeer — soft window light, quiet domestic interior, luminous glazed color — depicting a modernist glass pavilion in a birch forest, warm greys and a single vermilion, no text, purely visual --ar 16:9 --s 150 --draft

r28#27

R8Discovered styles: technique transfers, atmosphere swallows

Roll --sref random to discover styles, then read the seed off the job card. Seeds that encode rendering technique (linework, palette, print process) transfer to any subject and keep the wordmark. Seeds that encode atmosphere erase subject and wordmark; use them only on the off-brief lane.

flags: --s 150 --draft --sref random

a leafy sea dragon drifting among kelp, camouflaged as fronds, extreme macro close-up, in the style of Antonio Tempesta — Mannerist etching of battle and hunt scenes, dense energetic composition --ar 4:5 --s 150 --draft --sref random

r27#499

a desert varnish patina darkening a sandstone wall, cutaway cross-section, in the style of Walker Evans — deadpan documentary photography, plain-style frontal vernacular Americana --ar 5:4 --s 150 --draft --sref random random

r27#498

an abandoned greenhouse reclaimed by vines, cyanotype blueprint, in the style of Honoré Daumier x Carleton Watkins — lithographic caricature, loose expressive line, biting social satire; 19th-century frontier photography, monumental wilderness plate composition --ar 3:4 --s 150 --draft --sref random random random

r27#497

R9The Nous Girl rides as an image prompt

On 8.2 her reference goes first in the prompt as a bare image URL with --iw 1.5. Identity holds, palette survives, the scene survives only if the subject is not itself a figure: pair her with architecture, instruments, and machines, never statuary. --oref and --cref are refused; --iw 3 collapses to monochrome portraits.

flags: <image URL first> --iw 1.5 --s 150 --draft

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thedavidmurray/nous-inspired-design-system/main/public/nous-girl-refs/nous-girl-ref-E-source-mascot.png in the style of Stefan Sagmeister — hand-made object-typography, provocation, tactile lettering — depicting an observatory dome cracking open at dusk, primary red blue yellow, Bauhaus, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", coarse halftone dot screen, visible CMYK rosette --ar 4:5 --iw 1.5 --s 150 --draft [GIRL/iw 1.5]

r30#64

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thedavidmurray/nous-inspired-design-system/main/public/nous-girl-refs/nous-girl-ref-E-source-mascot.png in the style of El Lissitzky — Proun constructivist axonometric abstraction, red-black-grey — depicting a wasp's papery nest under an eave, aubergine and rose, plum duotone, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", coarse halftone dot screen, visible CMYK rosette --ar 4:5 --iw 1.5 --s 150 --draft [GIRL/iw 1.5]

r30#63

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thedavidmurray/nous-inspired-design-system/main/public/nous-girl-refs/nous-girl-ref-E-source-mascot.png in the style of Henri Matisse cut-outs — bold organic paper-cutout shapes, flat jewel and pastel color, white ground — depicting a pomegranate split open, seeds catching the light, rust and forest-green, warm earth, wordmark "NOUS RESEARCH", dot-matrix printer banding on tractor-feed paper --ar 4:5 --iw 1.5 --s 150 --draft [GIRL/iw 1.5]

r30#62

Archive: v10/v11-era output, not the validated recipe

Twenty-four frames from the May 2026 corpus that have an exact prompt on disk. They were made before this rulebook existed, with Midjourney v6-era flags, and no entry claims a rule. Each shows its verbatim prompt and the prompts-file line it came from. The other 173 files on the archive page have no recoverable prompt and get nothing invented.