The craft
The generating is the easy half
Every maker here has the same tools, and the tools are free. Nobody is checking whether you trained as a designer. What separates a set that gets picked from four that do not is entirely upstream of the software: what you noticed about the app, what you decided to show, and how precisely you asked for it.
Read the app first
The brief is not the assignment
The brief tells you a price and a URL. The assignment is on the other end of that URL. Open the app, or at least the landing page, and work out what it is actually for and who is meant to want it. A set that shows the three screens a stranger needs to understand the product beats a prettier set that shows the wrong three.
Builders rarely spell this out because they are too close to it. Noticing it without being told is most of what you are being paid for.
Decide before you generate
A set is an argument, not a gallery
5 images at most, and they should read in order. The first earns the tap, the rest answer the questions that follow it. If your images could be shuffled without loss, you have made a gallery and somebody else has made an argument.
Decide the sequence in words before you open any tool. If you cannot say why image three follows image two, no amount of prompting fixes it.
Two sets, same brief
What the difference actually looks like
These are diagrams, not submissions — nobody’s real work is on this page. They exist to show the two decisions that separate a set that gets picked from four that do not, both of which are made before you open a tool.
Sequence
Could your screens be shuffled without losing anything?
A gallery
Three views of the same idea, each as loud as the next. Nothing is being argued, so a stranger scrolling past learns nothing in particular.
An argument
The first earns the tap. The second answers the obvious doubt. The third proves there is depth. Reorder them and the set stops working.
Hierarchy
Is one thing allowed to be louder than everything else?
Everything shouts
When the headline, the interface and the background all compete, the eye picks nothing and moves on. Density reads as noise at thumbnail size.
One thing wins
A single element carries the frame and the rest recedes. This survives being shrunk to the size it is actually seen at in the store.
Ask precisely
Vocabulary is the leverage
“Make it look premium” returns the average of everything the model has seen. Naming the specific thing — the crop, the type weight, how much of the device is in frame, what the background is doing, which single element is allowed to be loud — is the difference between a result you can ship and a result you have to keep rerolling.
This is the part that does not transfer from tool to tool but does transfer from job to job. It is the durable skill.
Send fewer
Three attempts is a ceiling, not a target
You can send 3 sets to a brief. Sending three variations of one idea is usually worse than sending the one you believe in, because every submission counts against your pick rate whether it wins or not, and a builder reading three near-identical sets learns that you could not decide.
Send more than one only when you genuinely have more than one idea, and make the difference between them obvious.
The board is the credential
Nobody has to take your word for it
Pick rate is sets chosen divided by sets sent, published once you pass 10 submissions. It is a harsher number than a portfolio because you cannot curate it, and a more useful one for the same reason: it says that real people with real money chose you over everyone else who tried.
This is also why spraying submissions is expensive. The denominator remembers.
The money
What the work is worth
You keep 85% of whatever the builder named, paid the second they pick you. Nothing is invoiced, nothing is chased, and the funds were committed before you started, which is the part that makes this different from pitching.
A builder who wants one screen changed opens a new brief aimed only at you, at a price they set. Good work compounds into directed requests, and directed requests are the closest thing here to a retainer.
The briefs are already funded
Nothing to apply for. Pick one, send a set, get paid if it wins.