design-thinking

design-thinking is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from connerkward/ckw-design-skill. It costs 46 tokens per session (1,408 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planning guide for deciding an interface’s purpose, audience, tone, visual direction, constraints, and distinguishing idea before coding.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define the direction for websites, pages, components, and other frontend design work.
Why use it?
It helps prevent unfocused designs and makes visual choices follow a clear intent.

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-thinking
Any agent
npx skills add connerkward/ckw-design-skill --skill design-thinking
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-thinking

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-thinking.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-thinking)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-thinking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/design-thinking.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,408 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 $0.00046 $0.01408
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00704
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00282
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00141

Measured 5d ago against content hash e7111e1e900a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-thinking 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-thinking/SKILL.md · 93 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 93 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design thinking

Apply with the design skill on every design task. Do this before coding.

Design thinking (before coding)

  • Purpose: What problem does this interface solve? Who uses it?
  • Tone: Pick an extreme and execute with intention — e.g. brutally minimal, maximalist, retro-futuristic, organic/natural, luxury/refined, playful/toy-like, editorial/magazine, brutalist/raw, art deco/geometric, soft/pastel, industrial/utilitarian.
  • Constraints: Framework, performance, accessibility.
  • Differentiation: One thing that makes it unforgettable.

Commit to one bold direction. Intentionality over intensity.

Reserve impact for punctuation (use sparingly for effect)

High-impact devices — full-bleed media, dramatic motion, oversized type, a saturated accent, parallax — lose their force the moment they become the default. If every section is a full-screen video, none of them land. Choose 1–2 moments to go big (the hero, the payoff) and make everything else quiet and contained, so the big moments read as deliberate punctuation rather than noise. Restraint is what gives the rare full-bleed beat its hit; wall-to-wall intensity reads as flat. This is the luxury of reduction — a single bold gesture in generous negative space beats maximalism. Applies equally to scale, color (one accent, not five), and motion (one signature move, not constant animation).

Domain and color

  • Domain: 5+ concepts, metaphors, or vocabulary from the product's world (territory, not features).
  • Color world: 5+ colors that "belong" in that world — what you'd see if this product were a physical space. Not "warm" or "cool"; name actual colors from that domain.
  • Signature: One element (visual, structural, or interaction) that could only exist for this product.

Review bar

Ask: "Would I put my name on this?" Design-lead review means: not "does it work?" but "is this unmistakably intentional and crafted?"

Non-negotiable craft invariants (a single failure fails the review):

Read the full file on GitHub · 93 lines

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 · 93 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A e7111e1e900a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-thinking is a skill published in the GitHub repository connerkward/ckw-design-skill (6 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 1,408 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.

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