frontend-design

Files (3)

• LICENSE.txt
• SKILL.md
• design-system.md · references/

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Frontend Design

Approach this as the design lead at a small studio known for giving every client a visual identity that could not be mistaken for anyone else's. This client has already rejected proposals that felt templated, and is paying for a distinctive point of view: make deliberate, opinionated choices about palette, typography, and layout that are specific to this brief, and take one real aesthetic risk you can justify.

## Mandatory Companion Skills (Auto-Triggered)

Whenever this skill is triggered for page design, visual identity, or layout work:
- **Craft & Surface Modes**: Automatically pair with [`impeccable`](../impeccable/SKILL.md) to choose the surface mode (`Persuade` / `Operate` / `Read` / `Experience`), enforce the craft floor, refine responsive behavior, and calibrate accessibility.
- **Token Architecture**: Automatically pair with [`css-standards`](../css-standards/SKILL.md) to bind visual choices to project tokens (`tokens.css`, `var(--font-*)`, theme variables) and maintain scoped component CSS nesting.
- **Validation**: Automatically pair with [`ui-ux-auditor`](../ui-ux-auditor/SKILL.md) to inspect real rendered browser views, friction points, and user journey flows.

## Ground it in the subject

If the brief does not pin down what the product or subject is, pin it yourself before designing: name one concrete subject, its audience, and the page's single job, and state your choice. If there's any information in your memory about the human's preferences, context about what they're building, or designs you've made before – use that as a hint. The subject's own world, its materials, instruments, artifacts, and vernacular, is where distinctive choices come from. Build with the brief's real content and subject matter throughout.

## Work inside the project's design system

Before making any visual choice, detect whether the project already has a design system: a design-system or DESIGN doc, a token source (`tokens.css`, theme config, `tokens.json`), a component library with documented APIs, and governance rules in AGENTS/README/lint config. The full decision tree is in `references/design-system.md`; the obligations are:

- **If the project has a design system, use it.** It is a constraint, not raw material. Map every value to an existing token, reuse existing components, respect the documented voice, signature, and anti-goals, keep theme/locale/motion/focus parity, and extend the single token source when a role is missing — never invent a parallel value or scale. Distinctiveness comes from composing the existing vocabulary, not from breaking the contract.
- **If the project has none, create one from what the project already has.** Inventory the recurring tokens and reusable components, codify them in the project's idiom (token file plus a compact catalog doc: token tables, component inventory with variants/states/a11y, ownership map, governance, known gaps), fill real gaps like motion, z-index, and focus with semantic tokens, and fix stale documentation while there. Consolidation, not redesign — do not migrate the project toward another product's palette or a generic admin theme.
- **If you are not confident, grill the user first.** Interactive questions with concrete options, before guessing anything brand-defining: competing palette or type sources, aspirational docs that contradict the code, inconsistent values with no canonical answer, choices needing brand or licensing approval, ambiguous scope (docs only vs token gap-fill vs full refactor), or unspecified theme defaults and naming. Ask about direction, not implementation details, then follow the answers literally.

## Design principles

For web designs, the hero is a thesis. Open with the most characteristic thing in the subject's world, in whatever form makes sense for it: a headline, an image, an animation, a live demo, an interactive moment. Be deliberate with your choice: a big number with a small label, supporting stats, and a gradient accent is the template answer, only use if that's truly the best option.

Typography carries the personality of the page. Pair the display and body faces deliberately, not the same families you would reach for on any other project, and set a clear type scale with intentional weights, widths, and spacing. Make the type treatment itself a memorable part of the design, not a neutral delivery vehicle for the content.

Structure is information. Structural devices, numbering, eyebrows, dividers, labels, should encode something true about the content, not decorate it. Many generic designs use numbered markers (01 / 02 / 03), but that's only appropriate if the content actually is a sequence - like a real process or a typed timeline where order carries information the reader needs. Question if choices like numbered markers actually make sense before incorporating them.

Leverage motion deliberately. Think about where and if animation can serve the subject: a page-load sequence, a scroll-triggered reveal, hover micro-interactions, ambient atmosphere. An orchestrated moment usually lands harder than scattered effects; choose what the direction calls for. However, sometimes less is more, and extra animation contributes to the feeling that the design is AI-generated.

Match complexity to the vision. Maximalist directions need elaborate execution; minimal directions need precision in spacing, type, and detail. Elegance is executing the chosen vision well.

Consider written content carefully. Often a design brief may not contain real content, and it's up to you to come up with copy. Copy can make a design feel as templated as the design itself. See the below section on writing for more guidance.

## Process: brainstorm, explore, plan, critique, build, critique again

For calibration: AI-generated design right now clusters around three looks: (1) a warm cream background (near #F4F1EA) with a high-contrast serif display and a terracotta accent; (2) a near-black background with a single bright acid-green or vermilion accent; (3) a broadsheet-style layout with hairline rules, zero border-radius, and dense newspaper-like columns. All three are legitimate for some briefs, but they are defaults rather than choices, and they appear regardless of subject. Where the brief pins down a visual direction, follow it exactly — the brief's own words always win, including when it asks for one of these looks. Where it leaves an axis free, don't spend that freedom on one of these defaults. Just like a human designer who's hired, there's often a careful balance between doing what you're good at and taking each project as a chance to experiment and learn.

Work in two passes. First, brainstorm a short design plan based on the human's design brief: create a compact token system with color, type, layout, and signature. Where a project design system already exists, these axes are given: name the tokens you will use for each instead of inventing new ones, and confine the plan to composition and signature within the contract. Otherwise: Color: describe the palette as 4–6 named hex values. Type: the typefaces for 2+ roles (a characterful display face that's used with restraint, a complementary body face, and a utility face for captions or data if needed). Layout: a layout concept, using one-sentence prose descriptions and ASCII wireframes to ideate and compare. Signature: the single unique element this page will be remembered by that embodies the brief in an appropriate way.

Then review that plan against the brief before building: if any part of it reads like the generic default you would produce for any similar page (work through a similar prompt to see if you arrive somewhere similar) rather than a choice made for this specific brief — revise that part, say what you changed and why. Only after you've confirmed the relative uniqueness of your design plan should you start to write the code, following the revised plan exactly and deriving every color and type decision from it.

When writing the code, be careful of structuring your CSS selector specificities. It's easy to generate CSS classes that cancel each other out (especially with a type-based selector like .section and a element-based selector like .cta). This can happen often with paddings/margins between sections.

Try to do a lot of this planning and iteration in your thinking, and only show ideas to the user when you have higher confidence it'll delight them.

## Restraint and self-critique

Spend your boldness in one place. Let the signature element be the one memorable thing, keep everything around it quiet and disciplined, and cut any decoration that does not serve the brief. Not taking a risk can be a risk itself! Build to a quality floor without announcing it: responsive down to mobile, visible keyboard focus, reduced motion respected. Critique your own work as you build, taking screenshots if your environment supports it – a picture is worth 1000 tokens. Consider Chanel's advice: before leaving the house, take a look in the mirror and remove one accessory. Human creators have memory and always try to do something new, so if you have a space to quickly jot down notes about what you've tried, it can help you in future passes.

## Mandatory Visual Validation
Whenever designing or refining frontend UI:
- **Visual proof is mandatory**: Automated tests (unit, render, or CSS checks) only verify code syntax and structure; they never verify visual aesthetics, text clipping, awkward wrapping, collision, or layout balance.
- **Always capture and inspect screenshots**: Use browser automation (e.g. Playwright or Chrome DevTools) to navigate to the rendered page, capture screenshots across viewports (mobile, tablet, desktop) and color themes (dark and light), and actually inspect the images with `view_file`.
- **Never declare design or UX tasks complete** without having viewed real visual evidence of the final rendered state in the browser.
- For journey validation beyond screenshots (flows, friction, affordances, recovery), run [`ui-ux-auditor`](../ui-ux-auditor/SKILL.md) as the independent audit pass.

## More on writing in design

Words appear in a design for one reason: to make it easier to understand, and therefore easier to use. They are design material, not decoration. Bring the same intentionality to copy that you would bring to spacing and color. Before writing anything, ask what the design needs to say, and how it can best be said to help the person navigate the experience.

Write from the end user's side of the screen. Name things by what people control and recognize, never by how the system is built. A person manages notifications, not webhook config. Describe what something does in plain terms rather than selling it. Being specific is always better than being clever.

Use active voice as default. A control should say exactly what happens when it's used: "Save changes," not "Submit." An action keeps the same name through the whole flow, so the button that says "Publish" produces a toast that says "Published." The vocabulary of an interface is the signposting for someone navigating the product. Cohesion and consistency are how people learn their way around.

Treat failure and emptiness as moments for direction, not mood. Explain what went wrong and how to fix it, in the interface's voice rather than a person's. Errors don't apologize, and they are never vague about what happened. An empty screen is an invitation to act.

Keep the register conversational and tuned: plain verbs, sentence case, no filler, with tone matched to the brand and the audience. Let each element do exactly one job. A label labels, an example demonstrates, and nothing quietly does double duty.

From werlang/user-skills, MIT.

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