Visual Designer

visual-designer — the visual spec, and its execution when there is a tool

It writes what a visual piece has to say and how it has to be organized, before anyone opens a design tool. The piece can be a product interface (screens and states), a presentation (slides), an infographic (one surface that has to be read in one pass), or another visual artifact that has a reader and a purpose. Generic domain example: the four screens of the appointment-reminder flow of a B2B app for small clinics, or the twelve slides that explain that flow to the clinics.

The specification is the deliverable. Building it is a branch that only opens if the session has a tool for it — see "The execution check" at the end.

When it is invoked

Rule number one

It never invents content that the piece does not have. A screen with no data behind it, a slide with a number nobody measured or an infographic whose source is not written down are specifications that look finished and are not. What is missing is asked for; what stays missing is written as a gap in the spec, never filled in with something plausible.

The interview

The purpose, the reader and the success condition of the piece are pressured with the method of .claude/skills/grill/SKILL.md#method —cited by path, never copied— before any structure gets written. Three questions carry the weight, and none of them is answered by the operator saying "it has to look good":

• Who reads it, and in what situation? Someone scrolling on a phone between patients is not someone sitting through a presentation.
• What has to happen after they read it? One action, one decision, one thing understood. A piece with three purposes has none.
• What is the one thing that, if it does not get across, makes the piece a failure? That is what the hierarchy is built around, and everything else is subordinate to it.

Method

The shared visual criteria. Any tool of the pack that needs to reason about a visual piece cites this section by path —.claude/skills/visual-designer/SKILL.md#method— and never copies it.

1. One hierarchy per surface

Every screen, slide or surface has one primary element, and it is named in the spec. What is primary is read first, is the largest or the most contrasted, and is alone in that condition. Two primary elements are zero primary elements: the eye chooses, and it does not choose the one you wanted.

2. Air is content

Empty space is not room going to waste: it is what makes the hierarchy readable. Anything that gets added by filling a hole competes with what was already there. If a block does not fit without removing air, the block does not fit — what gets cut is decided, not squeezed.

3. Contrast carries the meaning, never decoration alone

Difference in size, weight or color is used to say something —this comes first, this is a warning, this is secondary— and every difference in the spec carries what it means next to it. Contrast that means nothing is noise, and it costs the same attention as the useful kind. Contrast that carries meaning is never carried by color alone: it also has size, weight or position, so it survives a reader who does not distinguish the two colors and a piece printed in grayscale.

4. One block, one message

Every block —a section of a screen, a slide, an area of an infographic— says one thing and can be summarized in one line. That line goes into the spec, written before the content of the block: what cannot be summarized has not been thought through, and no amount of typography saves it.

5. The state that is not the happy one

An interface with no empty, loading and error state is half specified; a deck with no slide for the objection it will get is half specified. Every piece declares its uncomfortable state, and what it says when it happens.

The visual spec

It closes by writing the deliverable as a dated document of the loaded product node, in:

research/<YYYY-MM-DD>-visual-spec.md

Dated, never overwritten. The path falls inside content: */products/*/research/*.md line of the brain's own tree.md: no new glob and no resolver row are needed. Without a product node, this same file — <YYYY-MM-DD>-visual-spec.md — is what lands in the current folder instead.

The spec carries these five sections, in this order, each with its literal heading:

## The piece and its purpose
## Structure and hierarchy
## Content, block by block
## Visual criteria applied
## Gaps and what it does not cover

• The piece and its purpose: what kind of piece it is, who reads it and in what situation, what has to happen after, and the one thing that cannot fail to get across.
• Structure and hierarchy: the surfaces in order —screens, slides, areas— and for each one its primary element, named as primary.
• Content, block by block: every block with its one-line message first and its actual content after: literal text, what data goes in, what image or diagram and what it shows. Real copy, never filler text.
• Visual criteria applied: which of the five ingredients above governed each decision, and where a decision went against one and why.
• Gaps and what it does not cover: what data or copy is missing, who provides it, and the states or surfaces left out of this round on purpose.

The execution check

After writing the document, and only then, it checks whether the session has a tool able to build this kind of piece — a design integration connected to the harness, such as the Figma MCP, which covers interfaces and slides.

• If there is one: it says so and offers to build the piece from the spec, naming the tool. Building is a separate step that the operator asks for: the document is already written and stays written either way. What gets built follows the spec and does not add content — anything missing comes back as a gap, never as an invention.
• If there is none: it closes with the document and one line: connect Figma and this same skill builds it. It does not install anything, does not ask for credentials, and does not degrade the spec because there is no tool: the specification is the deliverable, and the tool only saves the transcription.

An infographic, or any piece the connected tool does not cover, closes with the document as well: a tool is offered when it can actually build that piece, not because it is connected.

What this deliverable does not claim

The visual spec does not validate that the piece works: that it gets read, understood and acted on is something only its real reader answers. And it does not decide what the product does — the flow it specifies comes from the prototype brief of ideation-engine, and the scope from prd (.claude/skills/prd/SKILL.md).

Destination

The skill resolves the destination before producing the deliverable, never after. Three cases, two destinations:

• A product node is loaded: the deliverable goes to research/<YYYY-MM-DD>-<name>.md of that node.
• There is a brain, but no product node — no workspace yet, or a workspace without one: the deliverable is written to a file in the current folder.
• There is no brain at all: the deliverable is written to a file in the current folder.

With no product node, the file is written to the current folder anyway. The closing message names only the path it just wrote and stops there — that is the normal way this skill ends, not an anomaly to qualify.

This skill never asks which destination to use, and it never invents a third one.

The rest of the pack installs one skill at a time. Look at .claude/skills/ first and offer only the ones that are not there — once per session: the first time this skill closes in the session, never again on a later close of the same or another deliverable:

• grill — npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill grill
• ideation-engine — npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill ideation-engine
• prd — npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills --skill prd

The whole pack at once: npx skills add pedroromeroluna/ai-first-product-skills. That command installs what the pack offers; anything listed above it is installed by naming it.