Frontend

This file is a router, not a rulebook. The rules live in four rulesets under references/, and reading them is the work, not the preamble to it. Before touching any file, name the references the request routes to and the one reason each is needed, then read exactly those. Declaring the set first is what makes the choice reviewable: a reference you never named is one you decided to skip, and a reference you named but never opened is a gap you still owe. Freestyling past the routed set produces the generic AI-slop output this skill exists to prevent.

The bar is not clean-and-correct — it is work a senior designer at Linear, Stripe, or Supabase would ship. Correct-but-flat is a failure, not a finish. Protect the surface as hard as you protect the build: design is a first-class deliverable, not a one-shot decision you lock and walk away from.

Phase 0 — Route (before any UI work)

Request involves…	Read
ANY UI implementation, styling, redesign, mockup, or visual decision	references/design/README.md FIRST. It enforces two mandatory gates — the Design System Gate (a DESIGN.md must exist before any component is written) and the React Dev Tooling Gate (react-grab / react-scan / react-doctor installed by default) — then routes to the taste and brand references below.
Spatial structure — app shells, scroll ownership, "what goes where", "this layout breaks at X"	ALSO references/design/layout-skill.md for the mechanics, then references/design/stylegallery.md to fetch a named pattern contract for that exact spatial problem. Both stack on the style skill and add no visual direction.
Paged output — a PDF report, a print stylesheet, a headless-Chrome print pipeline, an HTML deck printed to paper, or any "why is this page half empty" break defect	ALSO references/design/print-paged-media.md for the page box, the fragmentation properties, the atomic-block set, and the keep-together side effect that strands a block on a near-empty page. It adds no visual direction and stacks on the routed style skill.
Interaction or motion work — micro-interactions, animated components, transitions, gestures, hover/press/state feedback, "make it feel alive"	ALSO references/design/interaction-skill.md. The beui.dev catalog is the mandatory interaction reference: find the nearest pattern, read its real source through the file's curl recipe, and adapt the mechanism to DESIGN.md motion tokens. It stacks on the routed style skill — never replaces it.
Hero atmosphere or ambience — an animated, shader, particle, or grid background; a typographic reveal (split, blur, shimmer, typewriter, count-up, marquee); scroll storytelling; spotlight / tilt / glare / glowing-border card surfaces; "make the hero stunning", "add a living background", "animate the headline"	ALSO references/design/ambience-skill.md. The react-bits catalog is the mandatory ambience reference: find the nearest pattern in its intent map, read its real source through the file's curl recipe, extract the mechanism, and run its retrofit checklist (reduced motion, off-screen pause, compositor-only, tokens, budget) before shipping. It stacks on the routed style skill — never replaces it, and never vendors react-bits code.
The brief's tone or surface falls outside both anchors — AI-agent UI, charts, landing sections, a brutalist or Tailwind-only build — or an anchor has no nearest pattern	ALSO references/design/component-catalogs.md: which catalog to read for that tone, the exploration procedure, and the licence and terms gate for every other catalog.
Writing or modifying frontend code, OR auditing performance / SEO / accessibility / quality	ALSO references/perfection/README.md. Lighthouse 100 in every category, measured on real Playwright Chromium (never the lighthouse CLI), achieved through architecture — never by dropping animations or hiding content.
Looking up a concrete style, palette, font pairing, chart type, landing structure, or UX guideline — or generating a design system from keywords	references/ui-ux-db/README.md. A searchable CSV database with a CLI: a lookup tool, not a posture. design stays the source of truth for taste and the DESIGN.md contract.
ANY implementation or redesign that creates or updates DESIGN.md — plus explicit operating-layer asks (personas, critique, debt, handoff, synthetic user testing)	references/designpowers/README.md + lane-c-review.md. lane-c is the Phase Final flatness/critique reviewer and fills the accessibility-constraint and accepted-debt sections DESIGN.md requires. Load other lanes only when their phase applies.

For implementation work, design + perfection load together. Beauty with a 2 MB bundle fails; Lighthouse 100 that looks like AI slop fails. Both win or neither does.

Draft guard — read before the first line of UI

Some tells regenerate by default, so they are kept out of the first draft rather than left for QA to find.

• No coloured edge on a rounded surface, decorative or state. A card, callout, stat tile, testimonial, alert, or list row never carries a coloured stripe on one side: border-top: 4px solid <accent> or border-l-4 border-indigo-500 on a rounded box, a coloured ::before/::after bar inside one, an inset box-shadow stripe, or a hard-stop gradient band or gradient border-image along one edge. The radius bends the stripe around the corner, and the result reads as generated whether the stripe decorates the card or marks it selected, focused, or active. Give the card its identity another way: a tonal surface (one ink at a low alpha, or the next step of the surface ramp), an eyebrow or heading set in the accent ink, a leading glyph, or more space between groups. Encode state with one ink at many alphas (hover/selected/active washes), a check glyph for selection, and tonal layering for focus. The coloured edges that stay allowed: keyboard focus-visible rings, validation states on form inputs, neutral 1px hairlines and dividers, and table rules. This covers pre-existing instances on any surface you touch.
• Lint before visual QA. Run bun $SKILL_DIR/scripts/perfection/check-accent-stripes.ts <changed files or dirs> on every stylesheet and component you wrote. It reads CSS/SCSS/Less, HTML, JSX/TSX, Vue, Svelte, Astro, Tailwind classes (including @apply and cva/cn strings), inline styles, and styled-components. Exit 1 means a stripe is in the draft: remove the stripe, do not argue with the finding.

Design System and Component Workflow

Every implementation must choose one of these branches before UI code changes:

1. Concrete visual reference: the user supplied a reference — treat it as the visual contract, then handle it by kind:
   • Static visual reference (screenshot, generated mockup, Stitch/Imagen output, Figma export, overview, or annotated packet): load references/design/image-to-code-skill.md plus the relevant design/perfection files, extract the reference's exact tokens, layout geometry, copy, spacing, states, and responsive intent into DESIGN.md, then implement reusable primitives against that contract.
   • Live site or URL reference (the user names a site to clone or gives a URL): load references/design/clone-from-url.md. Drive a real browser and extract the runtime truth via getComputedStyle — tokens, layout geometry, default/hover/focus/active states, transitions and keyframes, and downloaded assets — into DESIGN.md, then clone-code reusable primitives against that contract. Final QA for both runs /visual-qa in reference-fidelity mode: compare the actual UI against the reference pixel-by-pixel and verify the code is an extensible design-system implementation, not a screenshot-matched one-off.
2. Greenfield or fresh setup: if the user gave no concrete visual reference, design research is a build step with named deliverables — not exploration to be budgeted. Exploration-stop instincts ("enough exploration", two-wave caps) do not apply here. Fire every research lane IN PARALLEL before DESIGN.md is written, and open DESIGN.md with a ## 0. Research Log section recording each lane's deliverable — a lane with no Research Log line did not run. Skip a lane only when its tool or network is genuinely unavailable, and name the skip in DESIGN.md:
   • Embedded references: use references/design/_INDEX.md to shortlist 2-3 plausible Layer B references, then read exactly one Layer A style skill and one Layer B reference in full — every line, no partial reads (they are 200-500 lines; a sliced read produces the flattened token set this gate exists to prevent). Log the shortlist, the pick, and why. Use open-design only when the curated set has no fit; add ui-ux-db lookups for palette/type/domain questions.
   • Lazyweb real-product screens: READ references/design/lazyweb.md FIRST and run its recipe verbatim — do not improvise curl calls against lazyweb.com; the recipe mints its own anonymous token. Log the queries run, how many screens you actually VIEWED, and the layout grammar harvested — never pixel copies.
   • StyleGallery spatial patterns: read references/design/stylegallery.md and fetch the pattern whose primary spatial problem matches the screen. Log the pattern adopted and the element that owns the scroll.
   • Imagen concept drafts: generate 2-3 imagen concept drafts, each seeded with the loaded Layer A + Layer B tokens (palette, type, material); pick the strongest and treat the chosen draft as the reference-fidelity contract. Log the draft paths and the pick. Synthesize every lane into DESIGN.md. Treat sources as source material, not mood labels: extract tokens, layout grammar, component anatomy, interaction states, motion, and taste decisions, then recombine them into project-specific primitives. Before laying out sections, inventory the content blocks and assign each a job — hook, explain, prove, compare, convert, navigate, retain — then order sections by the visitor's decision path, not by visual symmetry. Never freestyle past the selected references, never copy logos or brand-specific copy. Then run the Primitive Showcase Gate (references/design/README.md Phase 0) before any product screen.
3. Existing project with DESIGN.md or a component system: read it, follow it, and update it before implementation only when the requested work needs a new token, primitive, state, motion rule, accessibility constraint, accepted debt, or reference-fidelity requirement.
4. Existing project with UI but no DESIGN.md and no reusable component layer: STOP and ask the user one focused question: should you preserve the current look with copy-nearby styling, or extract a real DESIGN.md plus reusable components before continuing? Do not silently choose.

The resulting DESIGN.md is the implementation contract: tokens, typography, spacing, primitives, motion, responsive behavior, accessibility constraints, and accepted debt must be named there before code uses them. Verify component primitives, states, and final screens with real visual QA evidence; pass design-system decisions, implementation evidence, and unresolved debt into /review-work for significant implementation work.

Ruleset 1 — design (references/design/)

The reference library has one architecture file, 12 taste skills (Layer A — how to execute), and 70 brand design systems (Layer B — what it should look like). Most non-trivial tasks load one Layer A + one Layer B. README.md carries the full routing flow, stacking rules, anti-patterns, and the mandatory browser-based Design QA phase; _INDEX.md catalogs all 83 files with mood-to-brand mappings — read it whenever routing is not obvious from the tables below.

Layer 0 — architecture

File	Read when
design-system-architecture.md	The project has no DESIGN.md (defines the structure you must create first — 8 sections plus a greenfield-only ## 0. Research Log), or you are extracting a design system from existing UI code.

Layer A — taste skills (pick AT MOST ONE style skill; they encode opposing philosophies)

File	Read when the user says…
taste-skill.md	Neutral or operational UI with no surface ambition — internal tools, dashboards, "just make it usable". The safe default; do NOT settle here when the brief signals glossy / premium / startup-grade craft.
gpt-tasteskill.md	"Awwwards-tier", "wow factor", "cinematic", "scroll-triggered" marketing/landing experiences.
minimalist-skill.md	"minimal", "clean", "Notion-like", "Linear-like", "editorial".
brutalist-skill.md	"brutalist", "raw", "Swiss", "experimental", "anti-design".
soft-skill.md	"premium", "luxury", "calm", "expensive", "elegant", AND glossy / glassy / liquid-glass / startup-grade product surfaces — pair with a high-craft Layer B (supabase, linear.app, vercel, stripe).
redesign-skill.md	Improving EXISTING UI — "this looks bad", "fix the design". Audit-first workflow; never use on greenfield.
image-to-code-skill.md	"Generate the design first, then code it." Pair with one imagegen file below.
output-skill.md	Stacks on any style skill when output is incomplete — placeholders, // TODO, half-done components.
stitch-skill.md	Stacks on any style skill for Google Stitch compatibility or a DESIGN.md doc export. A complete worked export ships as stitch-design-example.md.
interaction-skill.md	Stacks on any style skill when work adds or changes interaction or motion. beui.dev-anchored: read the mapped component's source before designing an interaction; reduced motion always.
ambience-skill.md	Stacks on any style skill when work adds a hero atmosphere, animated background, typographic reveal, scroll chapter, or card surface effect. react-bits-anchored: read the mapped component's source, extract the mechanism, run the retrofit checklist; one atmosphere per hero, cursor effects quarantined.
imagegen-frontend-web.md / imagegen-frontend-mobile.md / imagegen-brandkit.md	Image-only output (mockup, app-screen concepts, brand board). These NEVER write code — switch to image-to-code-skill.md if code is wanted.

Layer B — brand design systems (orthogonal to Layer A; stack freely)

When the user names a brand or site — "Linear-style", "like Stripe's landing", "Aside-style browser agent" — load references/design/<brand>.md as the token source of truth (palette, type scale, components, do/don'ts). Coverage includes aside apple stripe linear.app notion vercel claude figma airbnb nike tesla spotify raycast revolut and ~56 more; the full list with mood shortcuts is in _INDEX.md. Extract the tokens and apply them to the project's own content — never copy logos or trademarked imagery. If the named brand is missing, fall back to a Layer A mood match or the open-design skill.

React dev tooling

File	Read when
react-dev-tooling-skill.md	A React project lacks react-grab / react-scan / react-doctor, or you need per-framework install snippets and the dev-only gating pattern (NODE_ENV === 'development').

Ruleset 2 — perfection (references/perfection/)

File	Read when
README.md	Any frontend code is written or audited. Carries the seven tenets: real-browser audits only, 100-in-every-category floor, fix-at-the-architecture, never weaken UX for points, design-system compliance checks, and the response format for audit reports.
react-perf-tooling.md	Before ANY React audit. The Playwright + playwright-lighthouse + react-scan/lite injection recipe, per-route render budgets, and the React-specific root-cause checklist. Lighthouse 100 with 30+ unnecessary renders is NOT done.

Audit CLI (build for production first; never measure a dev server):

uv run $SKILL_DIR/scripts/perfection/lighthouse-audit.py https://localhost:3000

Run mobile AND desktop presets, 3–5 runs, take the median, diagnose from the JSON report.

Ruleset 3 — ui-ux-db (references/ui-ux-db/)

README.md documents the search CLI and the master-plus-overrides persistence pattern. The CLI (run from the ruleset directory so it finds data/):

python3 $SKILL_DIR/references/ui-ux-db/scripts/search.py "<query>" --design-system -p "Project"   # full design-system generation
python3 $SKILL_DIR/references/ui-ux-db/scripts/search.py "<query>" --domain <domain>             # targeted lookup
python3 $SKILL_DIR/references/ui-ux-db/scripts/search.py "<query>" --stack <stack>               # stack best practices

Domains: product style typography color landing chart ux react web prompt. Stacks: html-tailwind (default) react nextjs vue svelte astro swiftui react-native flutter shadcn jetpack-compose.

Ruleset 4 — designpowers (references/designpowers/)

README.md routes the pinned Owl-Listener/designpowers corpus into this workflow. It supplies design context — personas, accessibility and cognitive constraints, critique, debt, handoff, synthetic user testing, motion, role prompts — that must be distilled into DESIGN.md first, then used as the implementation contract. It replaces nothing: not this skill, not /visual-qa, /ulw-plan, /ulw-execute, or /review-work.

Quick routes — most common requests

Request	Load
"Build a landing page" (no direction given)	design/README.md + design/_INDEX.md shortlist → exactly one Layer B reference + design/taste-skill.md + perfection/README.md
"Aside-style AI browser / browser agent page"	design/README.md + design/aside.md + design/taste-skill.md + perfection/README.md
"Linear-style landing page"	design/README.md + design/linear.app.md + design/taste-skill.md + perfection/README.md
"Premium SaaS hero like Stripe"	design/README.md + design/stripe.md + design/soft-skill.md + perfection/README.md
"Improve this existing dashboard"	design/README.md + design/redesign-skill.md + perfection/README.md
"Add micro-interactions" / "animate this" / "make it feel alive" / "polish the interactions"	design/README.md + design/interaction-skill.md on top of the current style skill + perfection/README.md
"Make the hero stunning" / "add an animated background" / "animate the headline" / "count-up / typewriter / marquee" / "spotlight or tilt cards"	design/README.md + design/ambience-skill.md on top of the current style skill + perfection/README.md
"Build this screenshot / Imagen mock / Stitch output exactly"	design/README.md + design/image-to-code-skill.md + perfection/README.md + /visual-qa reference-fidelity mode
"Audit my site" / "make this page faster"	perfection/README.md (+ perfection/react-perf-tooling.md if React)
"Mockup image of a fintech app" — no code	design/imagegen-frontend-mobile.md (+ a Layer B brand if named)
"What palette/fonts fit a wellness brand?"	ui-ux-db/README.md → search CLI
"Where should this go?" / "the layout breaks" / scroll + containment	design/layout-skill.md + design/stylegallery.md on the current style skill
"What do shipped apps in this space look like?" / design-direction research	design/lazyweb.md (curl-only) + design/_INDEX.md shortlist
"Set up this React project"	design/README.md + design/react-dev-tooling-skill.md
"Use designpowers", "make the design workflow stronger", "add personas/accessibility/debt/handoff"	design/README.md + designpowers/README.md (+ perfection/README.md if implementation or audit follows)

Shared axioms (all four rulesets agree — apply always)

• No design system = no UI work. DESIGN.md exists before components do; every color, font size, and spacing value traces back to a token in it.
• Concrete reference = contract. When a screenshot, mockup, or annotated reference exists, match its pixels, copy, component structure, and responsive intent unless the user accepts a deviation.
• Never weaken UX OR flatten the surface to buy points. No dropping animations, hiding content, simplifying interactions, or replacing rendered/lit material with flat fills and flat geometric primitives for a Lighthouse score or a deadline. Hit 100 AND keep the surface dimensional — both, or neither.
• No emojis as icons. SVG icon sets only (Lucide, Heroicons, Radix, Phosphor).
• No coloured edges on rounded surfaces. A decorative accent stripe on a card and a border-l-2 border-primary stripe on a selected row are the same tell, and so is a primary-tinted outline on a focused card. The Draft guard above carries the replacements and the allowed exceptions; check-accent-stripes.ts must exit 0 before /visual-qa. Applies to code you write AND to pre-existing instances on any surface you touch — sweep them out.
• GPU-composited animation only — transform, opacity, filter; never animate layout properties.
• Slop animation is forbidden — motion serves meaning. Every animation or hover must map to a real interaction, state change, or affordance. A hover that changes nothing, motion on a non-interactive element, or a decorative micro-animation with no informational purpose is slop — do not add it.
• Done is the /visual-qa gate, not your own glance. A frontend design task is verified through /visual-qa - its HIG-based checklist, its capture matrix (every page and every sibling surface, phone and desktop, light and dark, scrolled-end, motion driven and inspected) and its dual-oracle completion gate on fresh evidence. This skill does not keep its own list of visual checks; the verifier owns it.

When to load something else instead

Situation	Load
Brand/style not among the 70 in references/design/, or the user says "Open Design"	open-design skill — the local nexu-io/open-design library (137+ design skills, 150+ design systems)
Driving a browser for the Design QA phase	visual-qa skill: omowright from js eval (owned engine for renders, attached engine for signed-in pages)
Pure TypeScript/logic work with zero visual surface	programming skill alone — this skill adds nothing there

Activation

Use for any frontend, web UI, UX, visual, design, styling, layout, animation, performance, accessibility, or SEO work — building, redesigning, auditing, or generating mockups. Not for backend, CLI, or pure-logic tasks with no visual surface.