Why your AI documents look like sh*t

We're all using AI to draft documents now. Proposals. Recaps. One-pagers. Internal memos. SOWs. For many creative professionals it is now the default starting point for any "quick jobs" that need to get out the door fast.

However, the documents these AI models produce by default look rubbish.

Default markdown. Generic fonts. None of your brand colours. Bullet styles you would never use. Random emojis. Capitalisation choices that don't match anything you've ever published.

They look like every other AI document on the internet, because that's exactly what they are.

And people have become really good at recognising them.

So you either spend twenty minutes reformatting every document by hand before it goes out, or you use it in its generic form and hope the client doesn't notice.

Most people do the latter. Then the brand they spent years building shows up in client inboxes as a Times New Roman PDF with H1 headers in slate blue and a bullet style that looks like it came out of a 2009 Microsoft Word template. The text says all the right things. The document doesn't look like you.

The fix is one small file

I call it an "AI document style sheet" file. It's a simple little file you generate one-time that tells an AI model how to style documents exactly to your liking.

It contains:

• Your brand colours, named and with hex codes
• Your typography: font families, weights, sizes for H1, H2, body, caption
• Your logo handling rules: when to use, when not to, sizing, padding
• Your layout conventions: margins, spacing, alignment, grid behaviour
• Your document format defaults: cover page rules, header layout, footer content

Now any time you want to create a document with AI, simply drop in your AI document style sheet file and the AI model will output a beautifully formatted document that's ready to use. No manual reformatting necessary.

If the document needs your logo, supply your logo file alongside the style sheet. The style sheet tells the LLM where to place it, how big, and how much clear space to leave around it.

You don't need to paste hex codes every time. No messing around with font files. You don't need re-explain what your brand looks like each time. The file contains the exact set of instructions the AI needs.

How to build the file

This is where the AI workflow comes in.

For anyone new to Made With Machines, an AI workflow is a downloadable set of instructions you drop into the LLM of your choice (ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini). The instructions brief the LLM on a specific job and then guide you through the steps. No prompt-copying, no technical setup. You open a chat, drop the file in, run it, and follow along.

(For tech savvy users: these are MCP compatible agentic skill files with accompanying knowledge bases.)

The Document Stylist workflow guides you through the setup. It asks you a series of questions that help it gain a complete understanding of your brand guidelines, visual aesthetic and preferences.

It then complies everything into a structured JSON file. This is a simple code file that can feed to whichever AI tool you use to create your documents.

The whole process takes about 10 minutes. You build it once. You use it forever. And you can create as many as you want, one for your brand and one for each of your clients.

What THIS ISN'T

Voice. Tone. Copy guidelines. Messaging conventions.

This file gives instructions on visual document styling and nothing else. If you're struggling to get AI to write copy that sounds like you, one of our previous workflows can help with that.

The compounding effect

If you produce 10 documents per month using AI, that is 120 documents per year that all need to be on-brand. If you spend 10 minutes manually reformatting each of these documents, that's 20 hours of your time wasted on repetitive work.

Run a studio with five brand clients, 10 docs per client per month, and that's 100 hours of wasted time each year (that's more than 2 working weeks!).

You can see how this compounds.

Spend 10 minutes creating this one little file, to save yourself dozens of hours per year.

This is where the ROI of simple AI workflows becomes abundantly clear.

If you found this useful and you'd like to discover some more ways that you could use AI within your business, you can book a free 15-minute creative AI strategy call with me here.

See you next week!

Sam

P.S. Don't bookmark this and come back to it later. Take action today. 10 minutes spent today could save you 20+ hours this year. The ROI is a no-brainer.