Adi Design

Adi Design

A calm reading room: clean off-white, sage accent, serif for reading, flat hairline surfaces, restrained motion. The goal is that every one of Adi's apps feels like one product made by one person with taste.

Canon & showroom: the source of truth is the ~/GitHub/adi-design repo (system/styles.css + system/tokens/), browsable live at https://design.adithyan.io. It is authored directly in that repo (no upstream tool, no export step). This skill carries a vendored copy of the identity + tokens so you can build Adi's UIs in any repo without cloning — when the canon's VERSION bumps, refresh assets/tokens.css from that repo's system/styles.css.

Flow

1. Read references/design-language.md — the aesthetic, the rules, the do's/don'ts, and the per-product notes. This is the part that keeps work recognizably Adi's.
2. Use assets/tokens.css (a vendored copy of the canon) for values. Reference tokens (var(--accent), --space-lg), never raw hex/oklch literals.
3. Wire the tokens into the target the way that stack consumes them (below).
4. Apply, then check against the hard rules — especially: no warm-cream background, one accent (sage), cards never over ~16px radius, no border+heavy-shadow ghost cards, reading prose in the serif.
5. If a product needs its own colors (an app's charts, a map's phases), keep those in a small local tokens.local.css layered after the core — do not add them to the shared assets/tokens.css.

Consuming the tokens per stack

• Plain CSS (dobby-dashboard, ~/GitHub/agents/dashboard): copy tokens.css in and @import / link it before app styles. Tokens cascade as-is.
• Tailwind (blog/adithyan.io): import tokens.css for the variable definitions, then point the Tailwind theme at the variables (e.g. colors: { bg: 'var(--bg)', accent: 'var(--accent)' }). Swap the body font to Newsreader for reading + Inter for UI, and replace any cream background with --bg.

The ~/GitHub/adi-design repo is the canon; this skill is a vendored extract of it. Authoring happens directly in that repo — see the note in references/design-language.md.

Scope — identity, craft, voice

Three skills shape Adi's work, split by axis. Keeping each lesson in the skill that owns its axis is what stops any one from bloating into a catch-all:

• adi-design — identity (the look). Palette, the three fonts, space/shape, the functional-accent and no-cream rules. The values + the why.
• impeccable — craft (the method). Contrast/motion rigor, anti-slop, layout-pattern selection (master-detail vs table vs cards), build/critique/polish. Deliberately no house style of its own.
• adi-writing — voice (the words). How copy and prose sound like Adi.

On Adi's apps, where they overlap, identity wins on look. File each new lesson where it belongs: a look rule → here; a method rule → impeccable; a voice rule → adi-writing; a one-app implementation detail → that app's local docs or tokens.local.css. Do not fold craft, content, or app-specifics into this skill.

With impeccable (the craft companion)

impeccable is a general frontend-craft engine — contrast, motion, anti-slop bans, build/critique/polish workflows. It has rigor but deliberately no house style. This skill is the missing half: the identity. They compose on different axes — impeccable is the how (method), adi-design is the what (Adi's look) — so use them together, not instead of each other.

When running impeccable (or any craft pass) on one of Adi's apps (dobby-dashboard, blog/adithyan.io, ~/GitHub/agents dashboard, or a new personal app):

• Treat assets/tokens.css as committed brand colors. Do NOT run impeccable's palette-generation / brand-seed step — the identity is already decided. (impeccable's own setup says to skip palette generation when committed colors exist; identity-preservation wins.)
• Apply impeccable's craft rigor on top of these tokens, never in place of them. Sage stays the one accent; no new palette, no cream background.
• The handshake is the project's own tokens + DESIGN.md: keep those pointing at this skill so impeccable picks up the identity automatically.

In short: impeccable for craft, adi-design for identity. Where they meet on Adi's apps, adi-design wins on look.

Evolving the language

The aesthetic changes in the canon, not here: edit it directly in ~/GitHub/adi-design (system/), bump system/VERSION. Then keep this skill in step — refresh assets/tokens.css from the repo's system/styles.css and update the rationale in references/design-language.md to match. Never edit a token value only in this vendored copy; the repo is the one source.