Designer

---
name: designer
description: Settle the look before the pixels — name the base and the delta, settle taste by looking, commit one design language to DESIGN.md. A command the user types, for work with an interface someone will see; standalone, no other skill required.
disable-model-invocation: true
argument-hint: "the product or surface to design"
---

# Designer

UI built without a style conversation wears the model's default aesthetic — the look it would produce for *any* product, which means it was chosen for none. That default is momentum, not design. And taste is the fork that belongs most completely to the user's world, yet it's the one the momentum of building never stops to ask about.

The concept: **name the base and the delta, settle the delta by looking, commit one language.**

- **The first question is the base — and how much of it survives.** An existing surface, a brand guide, a shipped base (**13 curated templates live in this skill's `bases/` folder** — minimal, editorial, neobrutalism, glassmorphism, neumorphism, bento, mono, retro, neon, paper, premium, corporate, claymorphism — vendored MIT from [awesome-design-skills](https://github.com/bergside/awesome-design-skills), whose full 67-template catalog stays one pull upstream), a famous style, or nothing. Delta zero is adopting: a successful outcome, one exchange, no research. A named delta is a remix: the base survives except where the user has their own understanding. No base is crafting from the problem itself. **Cost follows the delta** — research only ever covers the part no base answers.
- **A file base is read; an impression base is honored, never impersonated.** A template or existing surface in hand is ground truth — read it, absorb it, cite it. A vibe-named base ("Notion-like") yields *our* tokens in its spirit — never invented hex codes and type scales presented as facts about someone else's product. Claims about a real design carry their source; our own language carries its reasons.
- **Deltas come from what the user has opinions about.** Ask where they've signaled ("the colors and the motion I see differently"), plus one open door — "anything else about the base that bugs you?" — never an axis-by-axis walk. The axes (color, type, spacing, motion, density, texture, voice — the words on screen are design material too) are DESIGN.md's recording floor, not an interview script.
- **Taste is settled by looking, never by adjectives.** "Clean", "modern", "premium" select nothing. Show the thing: a throwaway style tile — the same screen under the proposed language, two or three ways only where a fork is genuinely open — as a plain HTML file anything can display. Keep the answer, not the code: the decision lands in DESIGN.md, the tiles get deleted. Say what each tile is asking about, and leave everything else it displays open for whoever owns it: to show a screen at all a tile must show a structure, and structure that was drawn is not structure that was decided. When nothing at hand settles a fork, offer the hunt **with its price**: real references found live for this product's domain and audience (galleries and award showcases are hunting grounds, not template bins), each with its source — never the canon every model recalls.
- **Commit one language to `DESIGN.md`.** It carries tokens in the W3C sense — named values with roles, the contract that makes generated UI look like *this* product — plus the rules, the base and its deltas, the references with sources, and what the language deliberately avoids. It also names the **signature**: the one place the boldness is spent, the element a screen is remembered by, with everything around it kept quiet. Craft is the floor whatever the direction: hierarchy that guides the eye, states that exist (empty, loading, error), motion with restraint — the user buys down from professional, never up to it. And the recorded language is auditable: any later review can hold a UI diff against it and ask whether the screen still speaks it.

One language per product: a recorded `DESIGN.md` is consumed, not redone — later screens speak it, a screen that wants to break it is a conversation, not a drift, and an incoming template's own design file is a base input to absorb, never a second language. The committed language is the deliverable; what happens next is the user's to type.