Aesthetics router

Skill HDeibler/universal-design-principles/plugins/aesthetics-and-emotion-principles/skills/aesthetics-router

Cross-agent marketplace of Universal Design Principles skills for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and other AI agents.

Install

npx -y skills add HDeibler/universal-design-principles --skill aesthetics-router

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What its author says it does

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Use this skill whenever a design task involves the felt quality of an interface — beauty, polish, brand voice, persuasion, emotional response, marketing surfaces, hero sections, onboarding tone, empty/celebration states, illustrations, mascots, avatars. Trigger when the user mentions tone, polish, brand, "feels cold/cheap/premium," personality, voice, mascot, hero, "make it more delightful," or asks how a screen should make the user feel. Framework-agnostic. Routes the model to the right aesthetics principle in this plugin.

SKILL.md

3.8 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Aesthetics & emotion — router

This plugin holds the principles that govern how an interface feels — beautiful, premium, friendly, trustworthy, alarming. They matter most on expressive surfaces (marketing, brand, onboarding) and least on instrumental surfaces (data tables, settings).

Principles in this plugin

Each principle has its own skill (with sub-aspect skills where useful). Principles marked [full] have reference-grade skill files; the rest are planned and will be added in subsequent passes.

Perceived quality

aesthetic-usability-effect — beautiful designs are perceived as more usable.
form-follows-function — form should derive from function; gratuitous decoration costs trust.
wabi-sabi — beauty in imperfection, asymmetry, transience.
veblen-effect — desirability that increases with price.
most-average-facial-appearance-effect — average faces are perceived as attractive.

Personality and tone

archetypes — recurring character patterns inform brand voice.
anthropomorphic-form — humanlike features evoke warmth.
baby-face-bias — round, big-eyed forms evoke trust and protectiveness.
attractiveness-bias — attractive subjects credited with unrelated positive traits.
phonetic-symbolism — sounds carry inherent connotations (sharp/soft, fast/slow).
personas — fictional users that anchor design decisions to a coherent audience.

Persuasion and emotional pull

exposure-effect — repeated exposure increases preference.
scarcity — perceived scarcity increases desirability.
supernormal-stimulus — exaggerated cues that out-compete natural ones.
immersion — flow state, distraction-free, full-attention.

Evolutionary biases

biophilia-effect — affinity for living things and natural patterns.
savanna-preference — preference for open landscapes with scattered cover.
prospect-refuge — preference for vantage points that allow seeing without being seen.
hunter-nurturer-fixations — gendered attention patterns (controversial).
face-ism-ratio — ratio of head to body shifts perceived authority vs. emotion.
waist-to-hip-ratio — body-shape bias in portraiture.
uncanny-valley — near-human faces that fail "human" cues evoke revulsion.

Heuristic for which to read first

Designing a marketing landing page → aesthetic-usability-effect, archetypes, exposure-effect.
Choosing a brand voice → archetypes, phonetic-symbolism, anthropomorphic-form.
Designing a mascot or avatar → anthropomorphic-form, baby-face-bias, uncanny-valley, most-average-facial-appearance-effect.
Premium tier marketing → veblen-effect, aesthetic-usability-effect.
Onboarding tone → archetypes, storytelling (cognition), aesthetic-usability-effect.
Empty / celebration states → wabi-sabi, anthropomorphic-form.

Cross-plugin pointers

For visual hierarchy and grouping, see perception-and-hierarchy-principles.
For learnability, see cognition-and-learnability-principles.
For behavior, see interaction-and-control-principles.
For accessibility, see process-and-robustness-principles.