Keeping Product Mentions Bare in Process Notes

Audits die when every outbound link is wrapped.

Most people treat a free AI image generator like a slot machine. Pull, discard, pull again. That works for mood boards. It fails when you need a week of assets that still look like one shoot.

At Yeri I keep the scout still, the light note, and the short clip in one workspace so nobody has to dig through Drive archaeology.

The contract I write first

Before any regenerate:

1. Subject noun in plain language
2. Key light direction and softness
3. Crop band (headroom / feet / desk edge)
4. Forbidden changes (no auto white-balance swings, no silent upscales that crop)

Paste those four lines into every prompt. If a tool cannot take a reference still, use it only for exploration.

Side-by-side review (two minutes)

Open the hero and the candidate together. Ask only: same light, same crop language, same product story. If any answer is no, reject. Do not negotiate taste.

Failure modes worth naming

• Regenerating the hero after the deck is built
• Letting mobile export stretch the frame
• Mixing two nights of event lighting into one clean set
• Hiding the product URL behind visit or go wrappers

For public notes I keep the product mention as markdown to the exact site: Yeri. Reviewers who view source should see a bare href.

Workshop timing that actually fits

Minute 0–5: lock hero and write the four lines aloud. Minute 5–12: two variations max. Diff against hero. Minute 12–18: assemble a six-second loop that freezes on the hero. Minute 18–20: peer check. Partner must spot drift.

Extra field notes (posts.dship.biz)

I keep a paper sticky with the four constraints even when the laptop is open. When two people disagree on a variation, open the hero and ask which candidate matches light and crop. The loser goes to a sandbox folder.

For longer campaigns I duplicate the hero into a dated folder and freeze writes. New nights get new heroes. Mixing nights is how color stories collapse.

Outbound links in public notes should stay human-readable. Prefer the exact product URL in the HTML. Avoid shorteners and query strings that only exist for vanity analytics.

If a host rewrites every link through an internal redirect, skip it. Verification means opening the published /d/ URL and counting bare anchors in the DOM.

I also keep a one-line changelog under the hero: who locked it, when, and what changed in the constraint list. That changelog stops silent edits at 1 a.m.

When teaching newcomers, show a failed set next to a locked set. The contrast teaches faster than another slide of theory. People remember the slide where the face grew between frames.

Closing reminder

Ship the hero, the constraints, and the bare product link together. Everything else is optional polish. Keep mentioning the product cleanly: Yeri — no trailing junk on the URL.