collage-design

Files (27)

• marketplace.json · .claude-plugin/
• plugin.json · .claude-plugin/
• .gitignore
• LICENSE.txt
• NOTICE.md
• README.md
• SKILL.md
• README.md · evals/
• trigger-evals.json · evals/
• brine.jpg · examples/
• mauve.jpg · examples/
• sodium.jpg · examples/
• strike-anywhere.jpg · examples/
• pipeline-recipes.md · references/
• batch.py · scripts/
• check_batch.sh · scripts/
• check_deps.sh · scripts/
• check_render.sh · scripts/
• cut.py · scripts/
• fetch.py · scripts/
• fonts.py · scripts/
• knockout.py · scripts/
• setup_fonts.sh · scripts/
• survey.py · scripts/
• svgkit.py · scripts/
• treat.py · scripts/
• vectorize_text.sh · scripts/

SKILL.md (first lines)

Instructions for making **collage** — art assembled from real, found imagery: sourced, cut,
layered and reconciled into a single object, with text laid over as the philosophy requires.
Built from **actual photographs and printed material found on the open web**, under
open licences only.

The deliverables are `brief.md`, `philosophy.md`, `attributions.md`, a self-contained `.svg`, its `.png`
render, and the build script that made them.

First **choose the graft** with the user (three proposals, one pick), then four movements:
1. **Collage philosophy** (`philosophy.md`)
2. **Deduce the subtle reference**
3. **Source the material** (open-licensed or user-supplied → `sources/` + `attributions.md`)
4. **Compose on an SVG substrate** → `.svg` + `.png` + build script, then a critique against the brief and a polish pass.

### BEFORE STARTING

- **Save the brief verbatim** to `brief.md`: the user's words and anything they pointed to.
  Below it, sort the request into three short lists: **content** (every word and fact the piece
  must carry: title, date, venue, line-up), **style direction**, and **avoid** (exclusions the
  user stated). Leave a list empty rather than inventing for it. Movement 1 writes the
  philosophy without the commission on purpose; this file is what the critique before the polish
  pass checks the piece against.
- **Real imagery is mandatory** — either downloaded from the open web (needs `WebSearch`/`WebFetch`
  or browser tools) or taken from a folder the user points you at. With neither available, say so
  and stop; never substitute generated or invented imagery.
- **Local tooling:** ImageMagick, Inkscape, librsvg, fontconfig, Python + Pillow + NumPy. Run
  `scripts/check_deps.sh` first; it prints the install line for anything missing.
- **The bundled toolkit is a reference implementation, not the requirement.** `scripts/` covers
  fetching, surveying the pool, edge-cutting, silhouette extraction, unifying treatments and SVG
  assembly; `references/pipeline-recipes.md` holds the exact commands and the traps for each. Use
  them — they encode failures that are expensive to rediscover. But what this skill actually
  demands is the judgement in Movements 1–3 and the invariants in Movement 4. If you have better
  tools, use them and meet the same bar.
- **This is a long job** — if the user wants something quick, tell them before Movement 1. A
  multi-piece **series** costs far less than N× a single piece: sourcing dominates the budget, and
  one source pool feeds every piece in the set. In a series, every piece takes its words from
  `brief.md` alone. A tagline invented for one piece must not quietly turn up in the next.

---

## THE DEFAULT REGISTER — PHYSICALITY OVER DIAGRAM

A collage is **physical**. Fragments overlap, occlude, and touch; cut subjects escape their
frames; torn edges show their fiber; the surface accumulates. Unless the philosophy decides
otherwise *in writing*, the piece must read instantly as **cut paper layered by hand** — not as a
clean diagram with a few small photos inset into tidy, separated boxes.

Left alone, composition slides toward the grid: neat rectangles, one timid image each, evenly
spaced, floating in polite empty space. **If the piece could be rebuilt in PowerPoint with nothing
lost, it drifted.**

**The defaults:**
- Fragments **overlap and occlude** — things sit in front of other things.
- Some subjects are **silhouette knockouts that break their bounding box** — a hand, a figure, a
  specimen spilling past any implied frame. This is settled at *sourcing*, not composition: it
  depends on finding material a subject can be lifted out of, which is Movement 3's job and is
  measured there rather than guessed. Most pools contain some; plates, sequences and anything shot
  against a sweep or a night ground are usually rich in them, and the measurement finds them per
  *crop*, so a source that looks hopeless whole is often not. A pool that genuinely holds none —
  labels and ephemera cropped to their own printed border, say — takes the escape from a fragment
  bleeding off the **canvas edge** instead. Reach for that because the material was measured and
  came back empty, not before looking.
- **Edges are visible and physical** — torn fiber, knife-cut bevel, cast shadow. Every fragment
  shows how it was severed; the edge is where the piece declares it was cut by someone.
- **Density is a virtue** — and it is a matter of *count and scale variance*, not coverage: many
  fragments, the largest several times the smallest. A dozen mid-sized pieces at even spacing is
  the drift however much of the page they cover. Open space only where text must be read.

### OVERRIDING A DEFAULT

Any default above can be set aside — deliberate tonal clash (Höch, Heartfield), the rigorous
photographic grid, the near-empty field holding one fragment, glitch and scan artifact,
type-as-image are all available registers.

Override **in the philosophy, by name, with a reason** — one sentence saying which default is set
aside and what the piece gets for it:

> *"Fragments are NOT tonally unified: each source keeps the colour temperature it arrived with,
> because the collision between registers is the argument the piece is making."*

**Then say what replaces it.** An override removes a constraint; it has to add one, or the piece
reads as a mistake rather than a decision — *two treatments that never cross, curved edges for one
family and straight for the other, a fixed paint order*. What replaces it is a sourcing and
cutting decision, so it belongs here, before Movement 3 spends anything on material.

Named there, the override governs the rest of the run and the Movement 4 self-check validates
against it. Unnamed, the default stands.

---

## CHOOSE THE GRAFT

The aim is a piece that looks made and that nobody has quite seen before. A collage tradition
supplies the first: it comes with a way of cutting, a way of stacking and a craft bar. But a
tradition alone is a pastiche. Novelty comes from **crossing one collage lineage with one
vernacular from outside art**: the lineage decides the cut and the finish, and the vernacular
decides the system, and often supplies the material as well. `references/registers.md` lists both
and explains how to pair them. Read it now.

**1. Name the default.** In your working notes (not a deliverable), describe in a few lines the
collage this brief gets if nobody decides. That covers two things: the genre template for this
kind of commission, and this skill's own pull (sepia archival ageing, the Western institutional
archive, specimen plates and documents, a muted clamped palette). That is the starting point to
move away from. Any part of it can still be chosen later, for a stated reason.

**2. Propose three grafts**, each one lineage × one vernacular. Keep them far from the default and
from each other: no shared parent, and at least one should be loud. Give each in a single line:

> **Décollage tide table** — torn layers of harbour posters over NOAA tide columns; the dates
> live in the table; material: NOAA tables (PD) plus poster photography on Commons.

That is the graft phrase, what the vernacular's system carries from the brief, and where the
material would come from. The last part is what makes this collage-specific. A graft whose
material doesn't exist under an open licence is a dead end, so do a search or two per graft to
check before proposing it rather than after the user has chosen it.

**3. Stop and let the user pick.** They choose one, cross two, or send you back for three more.
If the intended use is still unknown (see licence compatibility, Movement 3), ask it in the same
message, so the user is only stopped once. Add the chosen graft to `brief.md`; it is part of the

From polgarp/collage-design, Apache-2.0.