designing

Imported from blauwtje/exo (skills/designing/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add blauwtje/exo --skill designing. Copyright stays with the author.

Visual Design

Design so the result cannot be mistaken for a template: every visual choice traceable to the subject, audience, or page job, plus one evidence-backed differentiator a competitor could not justify. The enemy is the transferable default — a design that could accept another product name unchanged. The overcorrection is novelty that obscures content, removes states, or breaks accessibility.

A full or bounded redesign fails when the rendered result stays materially interchangeable with the baseline, when supporting regions stay generic while one focal point carries the design, or when a large empty area has no content, grouping, pacing, or staging job. Do not default an open axis — composition, type, chromatic hierarchy, surface treatment, imagery, motion — to absence: restraint on one axis needs a brief-side reason and expression on the others.

After a compaction notice, resume from the newest /private/tmp/designing/*/ run directory, not the conversation: Build reopens from its contract-selected.json, and renders/ shows the checkpoints reached.

Size the request

This skill owns a visual change at any file count, since Build dispatches its own builders. An undecided surface (its displayed data, settings or behavior) goes to shaping first; a change that also adds state, persistence, a dependency or a network call belongs to implementing-batch, which borrows this skill for the look.

• Sketch: a demo, prototype, or mock the request names as one, built on ## The sketch path of references/phase-build.md: no variants, agents, or critic; the floor holds.
• Full or bounded redesign: a new page/view/identity; a request changing at least three of composition, palette, type, motion, and content hierarchy; or a report that an existing surface is empty, boring, generic, flat, unfinished, or not distinctive. Run all five phases, bounded to the named surface; the existing direction is evidence, not a veto.
• New piece: a section, component, or view inheriting the existing direction, on ## The piece path of references/phase-build.md. A piece that changes the page's hierarchy is a bounded redesign.
• Tweak: one element or named visual property changes and no region is added. Change it, audit the touched surface, verify the floor, and stop; never expand a tweak into a redesign.

Route

Resolve the surface from the markup and style files in the working-tree diff, then the last touched one; with neither, ask only which surface, naming the candidates newest first. Then stop at the first matching rung, because comps earn their cost only where a chooser recognises a direction they cannot name:

1. Tweak: the tweak path.
2. Handed a direction: a plan's Contract: or a brief's contract-selected.json is copied to $RUN/contract-selected.json and resumes at Build (Phase 3), repeating neither Phase 1-2 nor the variant choice. When $RUN/inventory.md is missing and the size is a full or bounded redesign, dispatch exo:design-discovery for Phase 1 only before Build, never Phase 2.
3. Asked to choose: the user asks to see or choose between directions, or the brief's ## Visual direction names the user as chooser: the offer in ## Asking of references/intake.md.
4. Sketch: the sketch path.
5. Settled identity: the evidence ## Settled identity of references/intake.md lists, read when rungs 1-4 miss, while neither the user nor the brief lets it be replaced: one direction in text, no offer. A component library in the manifest is not that evidence on its own, because its defaults are the template this skill exists to replace.
6. Tool surface: an open identity on an app view, dashboard, admin or settings page, form, documentation page, internal tool, or component: one direction in text from Phase 1 evidence and the nearest sibling surface, no offer, because scanability and existing expectations outrank expression there.
7. Expression surface: an open identity on a landing, marketing, pricing, portfolio, or launch page, whose job is a first impression on someone who has not adopted the product: the offer, as in rung 3.

A surface neither list names takes rung 6, and the report names rung 7 as the rival reading, because a picker's spent minutes do not bar a later request for directions. A user who leaves the look to this skill has not asked for text: rung 7 still offers.

The loop

The references call these steps Phase 1 to 5.

1. Context. Read references/phase-detail.md whole, once; its ## Context guides this step. A full or bounded redesign takes the baseline pair first and hands Phase 1 to the exo:design-discovery agent; this session reads its report of at most 20 lines and asks its ## Open questions, never the repository ranges.
2. Direction. Decide it in this session, before any production code changes, under references/phase-direction.md.
3. Build. Read references/phase-build.md before the first edit or builder dispatch; follow ## The build floor of references/phase-detail.md, already read at Phase 1.
4. Critique the render. A full or bounded redesign follows ## The critique dispatch of references/phase-detail.md, already read at Phase 1, before the baseline capture, which precedes the first edit.
5. Check. A general-purpose delegate on sonnet runs ## QA of references/phase-detail.md, already read at Phase 1, with RUN, SKILL and REPO, and writes $RUN/qa.md; this session's close quotes qa.md.

References

Load a reference only at its row's phase and predicate, never the set up front. references/phase-detail.md reads whole at Phase 1; every other Phase 5 row loads by section (grep -n '^## ', then sed -n to the next heading). Phase 3 rows are read by the surface builder, never this session, except references/phase-build.md, which decides who builds.

Judgment

• Explicit brief requirements outrank every design default and tell list, and a human selection of a rendered variant outranks this skill's own preference.
• An approved durable design decision outranks a new direction; changing one requires asking first.
• Repository framework, naming, file-layout, and component conventions outrank this skill's code defaults; they do not preserve the visual anatomy the user asked to replace.
• Scope restraint limits which surfaces and files change; it never requires the smallest visual delta inside them.
• Accessibility and complete content/state coverage outrank visual novelty.
• A brief asking for showy motion or effects raises the ambition ceiling: tells and timing caps become minimums to exceed; contrast, reduced-motion, and state coverage still hold.
• This skill owns visual decisions only. When a shaping, planning, implementing-batch, or debug stage called it, return control for product decisions, ordering, wiring, persistence, validation, proof, and reporting. When no stage called it, execute the visual-only request and report directly.