Design Guard

design-guard: look at it before you ship it

Render the thing (screenshot, preview, generated document, a real run of the command) and check that, not the source. DESIGN.md and VOICE.md are the measuring stick; this catches what automation cannot.

Impeccable, the installed design method, owns the making of a frontend: its craft floor, its detector and its finish reviewer are the rulebook for one, and this skill does not carry a second copy of it. Route first, then check.

1. The floors, on every route

Neither of these is negotiable by a direction, a template, or a medium, and neither is stated in the method's own guidance, so they are checked here whatever route you took.

• Accessibility floor: contrast, focus order, labels on inputs and icons, keyboard path through the flow. (Legal baseline: see COMPLIANCE.md.) On a document: reading order and tagged structure. In any medium: never color alone carrying the meaning.
• Reduced motion (DESIGN.md principle 7): anything that moves collapses to static under the user's prefers-reduced-motion: reduce, with the content still readable. Exercise the preference, do not read the CSS for it.

2. A frontend: re-check against what was committed

The craft floor already ran, the detector already ran, and a reviewer that never saw the build thread already scored the result. Start from those, and report what is still open.

1. The direction contract was kept. It is the opening comment in the artifact (THESIS, OWN-WORLD, STORY, FIRST VIEWPORT, FORM). Read it beside the render: a block describing something the page does not do is the finding. A contract the production build erased is its own finding, because nothing can be audited against it.
2. The FINISH line is discharged. The contract closes with the run's exit condition. A page that looks complete with the finish review never run is abandoned, not done.
3. The finish verdict travels as it stands. Its open items stay open until they are fixed, under the reviewer's own disposition word. Never summarized into a pass.
4. The live-surface contract, on a redesign (design step 3): URLs and slugs, page titles and structured data, navigation labels, form field names and their order, analytics names, the wordmark, legal and consent copy. Anything on that list that moved without the owner saying so is a finding, and what does move ships with redirects.
5. DESIGN.md section 3 still mirrors the built world. It is written from the build after the finish review; code is the source of truth, so tokens that moved since leave a stale mirror.

Scoring typography, spacing, palette or layout tells again is not this skill's job: that ground belongs to the craft floor and the detector, which already ran. If something there is genuinely wrong, the answer is another round of the method, not a private list here.

3. Output the method does not carry

Nothing else judges these, so judge them fully. On a platform the method has no guidance for, the platform's own published guidelines are the missing rulebook: read them, check against them, and name the gap in the verdict rather than implying coverage that does not exist.

Visual

1. Tokens only. Every color, size, radius and space comes from DESIGN.md section 3 and the code that owns them: no raw values, no palette bypass, no near-miss grays. A generator that ships its library's default blue is a finding, not a detail.
2. The medium's own constraints are honored. An e-mail renders without web fonts and without the CSS its clients strip. A document paginates: headers, page numbers, no heading orphaned at a page foot, tables that survive a break. A CLI survives being piped to a file, with no escape sequences left in it, and stays readable where the terminal wraps it.
3. Layout truth on the real content. No text over text, no wrapping labels or prices, equal heights in a row, reserved space for what is optional. Check the ugly cases: empty, error, overflow, the longest value your data actually contains.
4. No stock-AI look. DESIGN.md principles 9 and 10 bind here too: a template's stock palette, a grab-bag of icons and an emoji standing in for one reach a document and an e-mail as easily as a screen, and no detector is watching this medium.

Voice

5. Reads like VOICE.md: register, wording table respected, direct and calm. Its banned-phrasing list is explicitly judgment rather than mechanical, and this is the check that catches it.
6. Errors follow the pattern: what happened, what the user can do; no codes without words, no blame, no false cheer. This is the rule that leaks furthest: a string in an API response, a log line or a toast is user-facing text and is judged here.
7. Every value has a label, and the output answers "what is this and what do I do with it".

Verdict

Report findings as one line each (<where>: <what's wrong> → <fix>), most severe first, then fix them before delivering. Name the route you took, so the reader knows what was judged and by whom. Nothing to report? Say "clean" and ship. If a finding recurs across sessions, it wants a token, a component, or a mechanical check. Propose that once, in INTAKE. ⚓