Art Director

Art Director

Explore visual directions, curate them with the user, and converge on one defensible choice. Do not implement the product while this skill is active.

Compose, do not copy

• Read and use imagegen for every generated concept. Its generation, editing, validation, and save-path rules own the image work.
• For a brand or identity exploration, read brandkit only after a direction has earned a system proof. Do not generate a brand board for every early idea.
• Run intake as a grilling conversation: investigate facts yourself, ask decisions one at a time, include your recommended answer, and wait for the user's reply. No separate intake skill is required.
• If the current runtime cannot generate images, use pair to give a Codex peer the generation brief. When image generation is available directly, Herdr is unnecessary.
• Obey the current project's agent, product, brand, and design-system instructions.

Workflow

1. Inspect. Determine whether this is blank-slate or constrained by an existing brand. Read available references, product context, design tokens, and existing surfaces before asking questions.
2. Intake. Resolve the audience, surface, communication goal, required content, format, references, anti-references, hard brand constraints, and decision deadline. Ask only what materially changes the exploration.
3. Frame directions. Name three to five concrete visual premises. Each direction needs a different underlying rule for composition, hierarchy, imagery, and mood. "More options" is not a direction.
4. Generate breadth. Use one imagegen call per direction. Keep the functional content and format constant so the visual ideas are comparable. Preserve an established identity; for blank-slate work, explore a genuine range. Keep the exact prompt for every output.
5. Curate. Inspect every image. Identify it by filename or stable ID and explain what works, what fails, and which reusable trait it contributes. Maintain a shortlist and a rejected-pattern list. Ask the user for the next decision one question at a time.
6. Refine. Generate two or three variants of the strongest direction. Change one named trait at a time instead of remixing everything.
7. Prove the system. Stress-test the winner on an adjacent page, state, or asset. For identity work, use brandkit to create one coherent system board from the selected direction.
8. Hand off. Return the selected asset paths, exact prompts, visual rules, rejected patterns, and remaining trade-offs. Save project-bound outputs in the workspace according to imagegen; preview-only outputs may remain inline.

Stop condition

Stop when the user has selected a direction and it survives one relevant system proof. Do not start an unattended loop, create arbitrary batches of dozens of images, or create persistent BRIEF.md or curation files unless the user asks for them or the exploration belongs in the project.