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…
Install
$ agentstack add skill-jangles-byte-atelier-design-direction ✓ scanned · ✓ verified, works with Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
Security review
✓ PassedNo issues found. Passed automated security review. · v0.1.0 How review works →
- ✓ Prompt-injection patterns
- ✓ Secret / credential exfiltration
- ✓ Dangerous shell & filesystem operations
- ✓ Untrusted network calls
- ✓ Known-malicious package signatures
What it can access
- ✓ Network access No
- ✓ Filesystem access No
- ✓ Shell / process execution No
- ✓ Environment & secrets No
- ✓ Dynamic code execution No
From automated source analysis of v0.1.0. “Used” means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it’s unsafe.
Verified badge
Passed review? Show it. Paste this badge into your README, it links to the public security report.
Links to your public security report.[](https://agentstack.voostack.com/security/report/skill-jangles-byte-atelier-design-direction) Reliability & compatibility
Declared compatibility
Compatibility is declared by the source manifest. End-to-end runtime verification is coming, see below.
We're building live execution health for every listing: tool-call success rate, median latency, uptime, and last-checked timestamps, measured, not self-reported. It isn't live yet, so we don't show numbers we can't stand behind.
How agent discovery & health will work →About
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](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](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](references/aesthetic-vocabularies.md), and check the result against [references/anti-generic.md](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.
Source & license
This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.
- Author: jangles-byte
- Source: jangles-byte/atelier
- License: MIT
Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.
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Versions
- v0.1.0 Imported from the upstream source.