aesthetic-literacy

aesthetic-literacy is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills. It costs 109 tokens per session (2,981 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for identifying and describing visual styles such as Y2K, vaporwave, brutalism, and cottagecore using categories like color, typography, texture, shape, motion, layout, and cultural references.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyze a named style, compare styles, or prepare a grounded description before creating design tokens or visual assets.
Why use it?
It turns vague style words into clearer visual decisions and helps distinguish similar aesthetics.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to analyze a named style, compare styles, or prepare a grounded description before creating design tokens or visual assets.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills --skill aesthetic-literacy
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for aesthetic-literacy

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for aesthetic-literacy

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills/aesthetic-literacy.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 109 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,981 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00109 $0.02981
Opus 5 $0.00055 $0.01491
Sonnet 5 $0.00022 $0.00596
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00298

Measured today against content hash 7888aced2d40, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

aesthetic-literacy scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured today.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/aesthetic-literacy/SKILL.md · 172 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 172 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Aesthetic Literacy

Summary

Gives an agent a structured framework for understanding named aesthetic movements as semiotic systems — not just visual preferences. Provides a 7-dimension decomposition model (palette, type, texture, shape, motion, spatial conventions, cultural markers) and a curated dictionary of 156 major aesthetics organized by family. Enables identification, characterization, disambiguation, and connotation-aware application of any named visual aesthetic.

Used as the foundation for aesthetic-application.

Compatibility / Tooling

This skill intentionally does not declare allowed-tools frontmatter. It is portable across Agent Skills-compatible runtimes and relies on reading this SKILL.md plus skill-local references/ and aesthetics/ markdown files. If an agent has file-reading tools, use them to load the referenced files; otherwise ask the user to provide the relevant excerpt.

When to Apply This Skill

Apply when:

  • A user names an aesthetic ("Y2K", "brutalist", "cottagecore") and wants to understand it formally
  • A user uses a vague descriptor ("retro", "cozy", "clean") that needs mapping to a concrete aesthetic
  • A user asks about the difference between two related aesthetics
  • A design aesthetic needs to be characterized before tokens or assets are produced
  • Another workflow needs to reason about aesthetic identity before producing an application spec

Do NOT apply when the request is purely about component implementation, layout structure, or accessibility. Those are outside the scope of this skill.

The 7-Dimension Framework

Every aesthetic is a system expressible along 7 formal dimensions. Always characterize all 7. Never reduce an aesthetic to one dimension alone (typically palette).

# Dimension What it covers
1 Palette Core hue family, saturation level, value range, contrast behavior, characteristic combinations
2 Type Type category (serif/sans/mono/display), historical style, weight distribution, case convention, letter-spacing norms
3 Texture Surface quality (smooth, noisy, glossy, matte, aged, digital artifact), technique (CSS gradient, SVG filter, backdrop-filter, image overlay)
4 Shape Border-radius personality, geometry (rectilinear/curved/geometric/organic), silhouette energy, UI element proportions
5 Motion Timing character (snappy/slow/elastic/linear), easing personality, animation types present (fade/slide/spring/morph), reduced-motion behavior
6 Spatial Conventions Density (sparse/dense), whitespace use, layering / z-axis depth, grid structure (strict/free/radial), content hierarchy approach
7 Cultural Markers Iconographic vocabulary, motifs, symbols, textual register — elements that signal membership in the aesthetic community

Read the full file on GitHub · 172 lines

Files

What ships with it

60 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. today Changed 7888aced2d40
  2. 12d ago First seen · 172 lines · 109 tokens per session scan A 71b752e7643d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

aesthetic-literacy is a skill published in the GitHub repository alexiseverage/aesthetic-frontend-skills (11 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 109 tokens to every session and 2,981 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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