design-archivist

design-archivist is a skill for Claude Code from curiositech/some_claude_skills. It costs 85 tokens per session (1,510 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A long-running research process that studies hundreds of real websites or products to find recurring visual patterns in colors, typography, layouts, and interactions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for broad design research, competitor analysis, trend discovery, or building a visual pattern database across a specific industry or audience.
Why use it?
It provides evidence from a large sample when a quick review or a few examples would not reveal reliable design trends.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the design-archivist plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it for broad design research, competitor analysis, trend discovery, or building a visual pattern database across a specific industry or audience.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist
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 curiositech/some_claude_skills --skill design-archivist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/curiositech/some_claude_skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install design-archivist, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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-archivist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist/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 design-archivist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/curiositech/some_claude_skills/design-archivist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 85 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,510 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. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00085 $0.01510
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00755
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00302
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00151

Measured 10d ago against content hash da054349fca7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-archivist 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 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/validate_archive.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.claude/skills/design-archivist/SKILL.md · 187 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 187 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Archivist

A design anthropologist that systematically builds visual databases through large-scale analysis of real-world examples. This is a long-running skill designed for multi-day research (2-7 days for 500-1000 examples).

Quick Start

User: "Research design patterns for fintech apps targeting Gen Z"

Archivist:
1. Define scope: "fintech landing pages, Gen Z audience (18-27)"
2. Set target: 500 examples over 2-3 days
3. Identify seeds: Venmo, Cash App, Robinhood, plus competitors
4. Begin systematic crawl with checkpoints every 10 examples
5. After 48 hours: Deliver pattern database with:
   - Color trends
   - Typography patterns
   - Layout systems
   - White space opportunities

When to Use

Use for:

  • Exhaustive design research (300-1000 examples)
  • Pattern recognition across large example sets
  • Competitive visual analysis
  • Trend identification with data backing
  • Domain-specific design language extraction

NOT for:

  • Quick design inspiration (use Dribbble/Awwwards directly)
  • Single example analysis
  • Small samples (<50 examples)
  • Real-time trend spotting (this takes days)

Core Process

1. Domain Initialization

  • Define target domain and audience
  • Set target count (300-1000 based on specificity)
  • Identify seed URLs or search queries
  • Establish focus areas

2. Systematic Crawling

For each example:

  1. Capture visual snapshot
  2. Record metadata (URL, timestamp, context)
  3. Extract Visual DNA (colors, typography, layout, interactions)
  4. Analyze contextual signals (audience, positioning, success indicators)
  5. Apply categorical tags
  6. Save checkpoint every 10 examples

3. Pattern Extraction

After accumulating examples, identify:

  • Dominant patterns - The "norm" (most common approaches)
  • Emerging patterns - The "future" (gaining traction)
  • Deprecated patterns - The "past" (avoid these)
  • Outlier patterns - The "experimental" (unique approaches)

Visual DNA Extraction

For each example, extract:

Read the full file on GitHub · 187 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 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. 10d ago First seen · 187 lines · 85 tokens per session scan A da054349fca7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-archivist is a skill published in the GitHub repository curiositech/some_claude_skills (218 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 85 tokens to every session and 1,510 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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