Design direction

Skill jangles-byte/atelier/skills/design-direction

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.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add jangles-byte/atelier --skill design-direction

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

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.

SKILL.md

2.6 KB, 473 tokens by cl100k_base, 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 critique skill 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.

What ships with it: 4 files

16.0 KB alongside SKILL.md