Design direction
Elite art-direction skills for Claude Code — design direction, OKLCH color, typography, motion, structured critique, and frame-rate craft. Any medium, any stack.
npx -y skills add jangles-byte/atelier --skill design-directionAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
2 things to look at
- 12 days oldThe repository was created 12 days ago. New is not bad, but a brand new repository carrying a familiar-sounding name is the shape a typosquat arrives in, and there has been no time for anyone else to find a problem with it.
- 2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
What its author says it does
Copied from the file, not written here
Establish a deliberate aesthetic point of view before building anything visual. Use this skill FIRST whenever starting any visual work — a website, landing page, app UI, dashboard, data visualization, slide deck, game screen, generative art piece, poster, or component library — even if the user only says "make it look good", "build me a page", or "design a UI". Also use it when the user complains that a design looks generic, bland, "AI-generated", or like a template. This skill produces a short written design philosophy that every other design decision follows.
SKILL.md
2.6 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Design Direction
Generic output happens when implementation starts before intent exists. This skill forces the intent step: a short, written design philosophy that commits to one aesthetic point of view — and names what it is not — before a single pixel exists.
Workflow
- Interrogate the brief — answer the five questions in references/interrogation.md. If the user's request doesn't answer them, infer defensible answers from context and state your assumptions; do not stall on questions when the user isn't available.
- Write the philosophy — a named direction plus 4–6 tight paragraphs, using the
format in references/philosophy-format.md.
Write it into the project (e.g.
DESIGN.md) or state it in full before implementing. - Pick a point of view — choose or blend a direction from references/aesthetic-vocabularies.md, and check the result against references/anti-generic.md (the catalog of default-AI tells to avoid).
- Then implement — loading the other Atelier skills (
color,typography-and-layout,motion) as the work requires them. - Render, critique, iterate — never ship a visual without rendering the real
result and running the
critiqueskill on it.
Which reference to load
| Situation | Load |
|---|---|
| Starting any visual work | references/interrogation.md then references/philosophy-format.md |
| Choosing/naming an aesthetic | references/aesthetic-vocabularies.md |
| Work is drifting generic, or reviewing for genericism | references/anti-generic.md |
The one rule
Every project gets one signature move — a single distinctive decision (a color no template uses, an unusual type pairing, a bold grid break, a characteristic motion) that someone could describe from memory. If nothing about the design is describable, the direction step failed. Go back to step 2.