design-system

design-system is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from connerkward/ckw-design-skill. It costs 67 tokens per session (3,368 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of implementation rules for consistent frontend interfaces, covering colors, typography, loading behavior, browser text flashes, layout stability, motion, and meaning-based colors.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when coding components, pages, or a design system with reusable color tokens, clear text hierarchy, and consistent motion.
Why use it?
It prevents random styling choices and helps interfaces remain readable, stable, and consistent as they are built.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ckw-design plugin — 7 skills shipped together

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-system
Any agent
npx skills add connerkward/ckw-design-skill --skill design-system
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/connerkward/ckw-design-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ckw-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

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 design-system

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-system.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-system)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-system"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-system.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,368 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00067 $0.03368
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01684
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00674
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00337

Measured 5d ago against content hash 9cbb385c9214, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-system 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 5d ago.

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.

design-system/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design system

Apply with design when implementing UI: components, pages, or design systems. Every color, type, and motion choice should trace back to these rules.

Token architecture

All colors map to a small set of primitives. No random hex values.

  • Foreground: Text hierarchy (primary, secondary, muted).
  • Background: Surface elevation (base, raised, overlay).
  • Border: Separation hierarchy (subtle, default, emphasis).
  • Brand: Identity and primary accent.
  • Semantic: Destructive, warning, success (and optional info).

Use tokens in code (CSS variables, theme objects); never hardcode hex for UI.

Typography

  • Hierarchy: Headlines — heavier weight, tighter letter-spacing for presence. Body — comfortable weight for readability. Labels/UI — medium weight, works at smaller sizes. Data — monospace, tabular-nums for alignment.
  • Combine size, weight, and letter-spacing so hierarchy is clear at a glance. If you squint and can't tell headline from body, hierarchy is too weak.
  • Fonts: pair a display font with a body font; keep hierarchy legible at a glance. Which fonts is direction, not mechanics — pick from the domain and push off your first/default instinct (the mean); see design-spatial §2.
  • Data (functional only): real aligned numbers, IDs, timestamps in monospace with tabular-nums — mono earns its place when values line up in a column. Do NOT sprinkle mono on decorative eyebrow/metadata microtext ("35MM · DEVELOP · SCAN", fake spec captions) for a "technical" look — that's the current trend-slop, not data. See design-spatial §2.

Loading order — first seen, first loaded

The first viewport must paint complete and correct, fast. Order every resource by whether the user sees it first; the rest waits.

  • Prioritize only the above-the-fold set (hero text, hero image/video, brand mark). Preloading everything is the same as preloading nothing — the true criticals lose the bandwidth race. Pick the few things in the first screenful and prioritize those.
  • Fonts: self-host WOFF2. Convert OTF/TTF → WOFF2 (Brotli; ~half the bytes, identical glyphs) and <link rel="preload" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin> the weights used in the first viewport. Never a render-blocking third-party font stylesheet — a Google Fonts <link> adds a CSS round-trip plus extra DNS/TLS before the font even starts downloading; self-host instead.
  • LCP image/video: fetchpriority="high" on the hero image (or the video poster); <link rel="preload" as="image"> it when it's CSS-referenced (the parser can't see CSS url()s early). The hero box must never be empty — ship a poster/low-res placeholder so there's no blank frame.
  • Below the fold: loading="lazy" decoding="async" on images; preload="none" (or "metadata") on video; defer non-critical JS. Always reserve space (aspect-ratio, or width+height) so deferred media can't shift layout (CLS).
  • Keep the render-blocking head minimal: inline critical CSS, defer the rest.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 5d ago First seen · 124 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 9cbb385c9214

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-system is a skill published in the GitHub repository connerkward/ckw-design-skill (6 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 3,368 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

design-spatial

Spatial composition and layout for frontend design. Load with design when composing pages/dashboards/components, or whenever generated UI looks off — overlapping/colliding elements, weak hierarchy, or generic ("looks like every startup site"). The core idea: a model can't trust its own layout, so render it, critique…

connerkward/deterministic-design-skill · 0 tokens

aceternity-ui

100+ animated React components (Aceternity UI) for Next.js with Tailwind. Use for hero sections, parallax, 3D effects, or encountering animation, shadcn CLI integration errors.

secondsky/claude-skills · 48 tokens

llm-wiki

Build and maintain an LLM-curated personal knowledge base — the "LLM Wiki" pattern from Andrej Karpathy's April 2026 gist. Use this skill whenever the user wants to ingest a source (paper, article, transcript, PDF, notes) into a persistent compounding knowledge base, ask a question against accumulated notes, lint or…

praneybehl/llm-wiki-plugin · 221 tokens

tailwind-css

Tailwind CSS v4 patterns: CSS-first config, utility classes, component variants, v3 migration. Use when styling with Tailwind, configuring @theme tokens, using tailwind-variants/CVA, migrating v3 to v4, or fixing Tailwind styles and dark mode.

iliaal/whetstone · 61 tokens

frontend-design

Use when user asks to build a web component, page, or application, or when the task involves frontend design, HTML/CSS generation, or UI layout. Applies specific rules for typography, OKLCH color, layout, motion, interaction, and UX writing to produce distinctive, production-grade interfaces that avoid generic AI…

harnessprotocol/harness-kit · 68 tokens

tools-unity-ugui

Unity UI patterns including Canvas optimization, list virtualization, and mobile-friendly UI.

IdoCohen560/claude-unity-game-studio · 22 tokens