What if the worst part of a creative project isn't the design, it's the brief that started it?

I built Dead Brief Resurrector on Melius — a workflow that takes a vague, broken client brief and turns it into a structured actionable direction, then immediately generates visual explorations from it. No manual prompting between steps. One input, full creative direction out.

The test brief I fed it: "We need some nice pictures for our new luxury skincare line. It should look expensive and natural. Maybe some plants? Something that feels high-end but also very organic."

That's a real brief. Designers receive versions of this every week.

What the workflow did with it, 12 nodes, fully autonomous:

Ingested the vague brief as raw input

Ran a brief autopsy — identified every missing element: no audience, no tone, no visual direction, no KPIs

Resurrected it into a full structured brief: target audience (conscious luxury consumers), tone (serene, sophisticated, grounded), brand name (Gaia Essence), visual direction (Organic & Earthy Luxury)

Generated a 4-image moodboard across ingredients, environment, textures, and human element

Generated 3 distinct visual concept explorations: Brutalist Zen, Botanical Alchemy, and Terracotta Minimalism

My Melius experience: The agent-first approach genuinely changes how you work. Instead of building nodes manually, you brief Mel the way you'd brief a creative director — in plain language — and it lays the canvas out for you. Every prompt is editable at the node level, so you can steer without rebuilding. The image quality surprised me, especially on the Botanical Alchemy concept. Where it still needs work: the agent occasionally needs explicit approval gates to chain text outputs into image nodes correctly — a small friction point in an otherwise smooth workflow.

Try the workflow yourself: 👉 https://app.melius.com/projects/091b9c6c-64ec-4baf-8ab9-39b80ed17daa/canvas/e8be693f-ec21-4d07-9851-5c4a7fa1eb6b

What brief would you feed it?

The detail and the precision is there, nice work

For a new Contra challenge, I experimented with Melius, a new agentic, node-based app. Using the Storyboard Director metaprompt as a starting point, I created a short microdrama story.

Take a look at the final video and screen recording walkthrough! Link to the project: https://app.melius.com/projects/97211597-0d55-4cbf-a5ea-2ff960099bbb/canvas/6b1eb2ef-8588-4500-bc91-2c2d7347fdc7

Thank you, Melius, for the credits and for the challenge! It was a fun one 🖤