Design & UX

UI must comply with WCAG 2.2 Level AA, as required by the European Accessibility Act (EN 301 549). Do not deviate without deliberate justification. Disabled UI elements are explicitly exempt from colour contrast requirements. Use when designing, building, or reviewing any user-facing interface for accessibility compliance.

The most important actions and content in a UI should be visually prominent — through size, colour, weight, and position. Visual hierarchy guides the user's eye to what matters most and signals which action is primary. Use when designing button groups, CTAs, dashboards, cards, or any layout where actions or content have different importance levels.

Related features and tasks — such as purchase flows, onboarding, or multi-step configuration — should be designed as natural, guided paths that feel coherent and fit the product hierarchy. Use wizards for complex sequential tasks. Use when designing flows, onboarding, checkout, setup sequences, or any multi-step user journey.

UI density — how much information and how many features appear at once — should match the primary platform and user type. Desktop supports dense, feature-rich interfaces; mobile requires focused, reduced layouts. Enterprise power users tolerate higher density than occasional users. Use when designing data tables, dashboards, toolbars, or adapting a desktop product for mobile.

UI should make it immediately clear where the user is, what context they are operating in, and what their actions will affect. Use lines, regions, colour areas, breadcrumbs, and scope labels to communicate hierarchy and context — especially in deep navigation structures or multi-section layouts.

Sticky and fixed positioning keeps critical UI persistent as the user scrolls — headers at the top, toolbars at the bottom on mobile. Use deliberately: too many fixed layers create visual noise and reduce content area. Use when designing navigation headers, bottom toolbars, floating action buttons, or table column headers.

Keep status and error colours minimal and consistent — too many semantic colours confuse users. Each colour must mean exactly one thing. Errors should be recoverable, large failures must be prevented, and the UI should always give the user a path forward. Use when designing status indicators, error states, form validation, alerts, or any feedback system.

Scroll areas inside a layout should be avoided wherever possible. When unavoidable, allow only one scroll axis at a time and always keep the user in control. Use when designing layouts, data tables, panels, or any component that might introduce an inner scroll container.

Mobile, tablet, and desktop are different interaction paradigms — not the same layout scaled up or down. Sections can be hidden, repositioned, or made sticky on mobile. Navigation and primary actions move. Use when designing responsive layouts, adapting desktop UI for mobile, or deciding what to show on each breakpoint.

UI patterns borrowed from the physical world feel immediately intuitive — cards feel graspable, carousels feel scrollable, drawers feel pullable. Use real-world metaphors deliberately to reduce the learning curve and make interactions feel natural. Use when designing layout patterns, gestures, or navigation paradigms.

When something goes wrong, the user must be able to recover or try again. Toasts, inline errors, banners, and notification patterns each have a specific role. Use when designing error states, success confirmations, async feedback, in-place editing, or any system that communicates state changes to the user.

UI design and review should apply Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics — the foundational principles for evaluating and improving usability. Use when auditing an interface, designing interaction flows, writing error messages, or reviewing any UI for usability issues.

Disney's 12 animation principles, cinematic storytelling techniques, and comic book conventions apply to web UI — used subtly, they make interfaces feel alive, intentional, and emotionally resonant. Use when designing transitions, micro-interactions, onboarding flows, scroll animations, or any motion in the UI.

Micro-interactions are small, purposeful animations and responses that reward the user and make the interface feel alive — an animated icon, a satisfying toggle, a subtle reveal. Borrowed from the natural world, they add delight without distraction. Use when designing interactive components, success states, toggles, loaders, or any moment worth celebrating.

Manage user expectations during wait times with appropriate loading states — from simple spinners to complex skeleton screens and staggered animations. Perceived performance is often more important than actual load time. Use when designing data-heavy components, handling API calls, building hero sections, or improving the feel of a slow interface.

Quick global settings — currency, language, region, units — belong in a persistent, low-profile location such as a header toolbar or footer. These controls are frequent but not primary, so they use small typography and stay out of the main content hierarchy. Use when designing global selectors, locale switchers, or user preference controls that apply across the whole product.

UI layout and grouping should follow Gestalt principles so users immediately understand which controls, commands, and elements belong together. Use when designing or reviewing component layout, navigation, toolbars, forms, dashboards, or any UI where visual grouping communicates relationships.

Pipeline skill — turns a URL or DESIGN.md into a concrete UI structure with decisions already made. Extracts live design tokens, normalizes them into a semantic system, applies UX principles, and outputs an actionable UI spec. Use when building UI for an existing brand from scratch, auditing a design system, or refactoring visual inconsistency.

Forms have three layers of guidance: helper text below the input explains what to enter, placeholder shows the expected format, and validation confirms correctness. Real-time validation for complex inputs. Submit enables only when the form is valid. Use when designing or reviewing any form, input field, or data entry UI.

Elevation — subtle shadows and layering — communicates visual hierarchy by lifting elements above the surface. Combined with border-radius, it creates the tactile quality of cards, modals, and interactive surfaces. Use when designing cards, dropdowns, modals, tooltips, or any floating UI element.

Orchestrator for the full dembrandt UX pipeline. Routes a UI/UX task through six ordered stages — brand foundation → design tokens → layout → components → UX polish → accessibility gate — loading the right sub-skill at each stage. Use when the task spans multiple design concerns: "design review", "build UI", "audit interface", "from brand to UI". For single-concern tasks (e.g. "review my colour palette") go directly to the relevant sub-skill instead.

Complex data deserves multiple view modes — grid, list, table — chosen by the user based on their task. Row and item selection should use large hit areas (the whole row or card, not just a checkbox). Selected state is communicated through a subtle background colour shift. Mass actions appear when items are selected. Use when designing data tables, product listings, file browsers, or any multi-item collection.

Buttons, inputs, pills, badges, calendars, and other interactive components form a visual family — they share the same border-radius, colour logic, shadow scale, border style, and spacing rhythm. Inconsistency between them breaks the sense of a coherent product. Use when building or reviewing a component library, design system, or any set of UI components.

Choose light, dark, or combined color mode deliberately based on brand tone and user context. Offer a theme selector only when user control genuinely matters — enterprise tools, data-heavy UIs, or extended-use applications. Use when defining the base color palette, designing a design system, or deciding whether to build dark mode support.