Design

Design

Family of opinionated design skills for reviewing and improving real frontend code. Most paths start by establishing project context (design-context), then branch into a transformation (animate, bolder, polish) or a review (critique, audit, check).

One-time setup

• design-context — gathers project-specific design context (brand, audience, design system) and writes .design-context.md. Run this first; almost every other design-* skill produces generic output without it.

Routing table

Foundation

• design-context — first-run setup, project priming (see above).
• design-frontend — build distinctive production-grade UI; avoid generic AI aesthetics; entry point for new components/pages/dashboards.
• design-extract — pull repeated UI into reusable components / tokens / patterns; grow the design system.
• design-normalize — re-align drifted UI back to design-system tokens and patterns.

Visual treatment

• design-colorize — strategic color for monochrome / gray / dull interfaces.
• design-quieter — tone down loud / aggressive / overstimulating designs.
• design-bolder — amplify safe / generic designs with concrete intensity options.
• design-typeset — fix font choice, hierarchy, sizing, weight, readability.
• design-typography-rules — enforce typographic correctness (quotes, dashes, spacing); auto-applies when generating UI with text.
• design-arrange — layout, spacing, rhythm, visual hierarchy.
• design-animate — purposeful animation, micro-interactions, motion.
• design-delight — moments of joy, personality, memorable touches.
• design-overdrive — push past conventional limits (shaders, physics, scroll-driven, 60fps).
• design-distill — strip to essence; remove unnecessary complexity.

UX content and flow

• design-clarify — improve UX copy, labels, error messages, microcopy.
• design-onboard — first-run experience, empty states, activation.
• design-adapt — responsive layouts, breakpoints, touch targets, cross-device.
• design-harden — resilience: error states, i18n, overflow, edge cases.
• design-optimize — performance: loading, rendering, bundle size, animation FPS.

Review and quality

• design-audit — usability eval of existing source or live URL; for symptoms like "users keep abandoning this form".
• design-critique — UX critique with scoring, persona testing, actionable feedback.
• design-taste — diagnose why a UI reads as generic "AI slop"; taxonomy of tells (type/color/layout/copy/…), taste heuristics, and the anti-slop move for each, with a slop score.
• design-check — technical quality report (a11y, perf, theming, responsive, anti-patterns) with P0–P3 ratings.
• design-polish — final pre-ship pass: alignment, spacing, micro-detail.

Cross-family edges

• figma-make-to-vite — when the user wants to take a Figma Make export and turn it into a working Vite app; pair with design-frontend and design-context.
• react-composition — when extracting components in design-extract, the React API design lives here.
• react-best-practices — pairs with design-optimize for render-perf root causes.
• pages-prepare-vite and the rest of pages-* — when shipping the resulting design as a static site.
• tauri-windows-custom-titlebar / tauri-windows-transparency-vibrancy — when the surface is a Tauri WebView, not a plain browser page.
• code-review-cycle — to land design changes through review.

Decision flow

1. No .design-context.md in repo → start with design-context regardless of the immediate ask.
2. Building something new → design-frontend.
3. User describes a symptom ("feels off", "users confused") → design-audit or design-critique.
4. User says it "looks AI-made" / generic / templated / safe → design-taste (detect the tells), then design-bolder or design-frontend to fix.
5. User names a specific lever (color / type / motion / layout / copy) → jump directly to that sibling.
6. User says "ship-ready" / "final pass" → design-polish, then design-check, then design-harden.
7. User wants a design system out of repeated UI → design-extract, then design-normalize to retrofit usages.
8. Closing gate for any sequence — after build / amplify / animate / polish, run design-taste before shipping to confirm none of that work introduced slop (its scripts/detect-slop.py catches the mechanical tells deterministically).

When NOT to use this skill

• Pure CSS/HTML syntax questions with no design judgment involved — go to MDN.
• Logo, illustration, or brand-identity work — these skills assume application UI.
• Pure performance engineering with no visible UI symptom — use a perf profiler workflow.
• Brand strategy / marketing copy — design-clarify handles UX microcopy only.