How I Made A Custom GPT For Redesignia

I was sure it would be complicated or require coding to make a custom GPT for my business but, fortunately for me, it doesn't. There are two different ways to build a custom GPT. You can build it with your own specific directions or have the ChatGPT model help you build it.

The one I created is called, Creative Soup- AI for branding and websites, an easy and accessible way for people to interact with and learn the basics of web design and branding if they don’t feel like reading through all my blog archives. This can help people make a landing page or portfolio website on their own.

First I took a course on LinkedIn, of all places, to learn how to build a custom GPT. The course is called Hands-On AI: Build Your Own GPTs by Alina Zhang. From the course, I learned a structure to get very specific results.

The prompt engineering framework is persona, constraint, output, context, and task. Here’s a breakdown of how I made a custom GPT for my business.

Persona

This is where you'll describe exactly how you want your GPT to think of itself. This includes who they are, what their expertise is, and what company or industry they represent.

For each sections, feel free to be as descriptive and expansive as you want with as many sentences or paragraphs as you need.

Here's the first two sentences of mine as an example:

You are Redo, the mascot for the company Redesignia. You have ten years of design experience and have studied graphic design, mood boards, web design and branding best practices.

Constraint

This is where you focus in on the GPT's primary focus. Also include instructions to prevent prompt injection and leakage. You can include specific phrases for the GPT to reply with if anyone asks an irrelevant question.

Here's part of mine:

Your primary focus must be on giving mood board, web design and branding advice, applying design best practices, design insights and rules to different creative outputs such as websites, visual content and branding elements.

Output

This section covers how you want the responses to be formatted. Do you want paragraphs or lists? I like to have the output not be too long winded with long paragraphs. This also includes the tone of the response.

Here's mine:

Your guidance should be personalized, practical, and step-by-step. Maintain a concise, clear, and casual tone throughout your advice, ensuring it does not exceed 300 words per response.

Context

This covers the knowledge files you upload, more on that later, and information found from other sources like the internet. If you have very specific knowledge or information this is one of the more important sections.

Here's mine:

Your role is to guide, advise, and support people in achieving their graphic design, web design or branding objectives by applying your design wisdom from the Knowledge files to their projects.

Task

This is where you break it down, step by step, how the GPT should answer questions. Do they need to ask questions to understand the problem better or should they start answering right away? One of my pet peeves with some AI tools is they start answering right away with zero context so it’s not relevant.

Here's mine:

Step 1: Begin by introducing yourself, highlighting your design background and its relevance.

Step 2: Do not offer advice immediately! Instead, ask clients 1 to 2 questions about the context so that when they answer, you can provide effective and personalized solutions.

You can also test out if any of these specific constraints are working before publishing.

Knowledge Files

If you have specific knowledge or data that you want the GPT to have access to it's a good idea to upload that in the knowledge file section. I like to upload these in a simple text file (txt) so I don’t need to worry about confusing formatting. For my GPT, I uploaded several relevant blog posts from the Redesignia blog on web design, mood boards, and branding.

Make It Live

Once you've played around and tested your GPT you can decide to keep it private, allow access only with the link or publish to the GPT marketplace. You can try out mine, Creative Soup- AI for branding and websites, if you like.