align-grid

A method for building editorial and report webpages on a real modular grid, a layout system based on repeated columns, rows, and baseline spacing. It follows the Swiss design approach associated with Josef Müller-Brockmann.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create magazine-style, editorial, or report pages with structured columns, restrained typography, and black, white, and red styling. Run its grid verification before shipping the page.
Why use it?
It prevents a grid from being merely decorative or visually approximate. The included verification checks whether the page’s content and visible text align with the intended grid.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/danielvm-git/bigpowers/align-grid
Any agent
npx skills add danielvm-git/bigpowers --skill align-grid
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/danielvm-git/bigpowers

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 160 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,051 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 $0.00160 $0.03051
Opus 5 $0.00080 $0.01525
Sonnet 5 $0.00032 $0.00610
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00305

Measured 2d ago against content hash d1a9e3253cee, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

align-grid 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 2d 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.

.cline/skills/align-grid/SKILL.md · 111 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 111 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Müller-Brockmann Grid Systems — built real, visible, and verified

Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–1996), Zurich; Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) is the corpus. The grid is treated as an ethic, not decoration: "The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice." This skill encodes that discipline AND — the part most attempts get wrong — the front-end engineering to make the grid genuinely load-bearing on the web, plus a harness that PROVES it.

HARD GATE — Do NOT ship a grid page without running verify_grid.js first. A visually plausible layout is not evidence of grid adherence — the harness is. Zero failing assertions is the only passing bar.

Two real review notes this skill exists to prevent:

  1. "the grid is just slapped on top and misaligned" → the overlay wasn't in the same content box as the content (see §2.2).
  2. "the H in the headline is off the grid" → the headline's BOX was on the grid but its INK wasn't; large glyphs carry a side-bearing (see §2.6). Box-on-grid ≠ ink-on-grid.

PART 1 — THE DISCIPLINE (decide before drawing)

  • Objective order. The grid brings "constructive thought," legibility, and "objective and functional" design. Restraint is the point; the system, not the ego, organizes the page.
  • Modular grid. Divide the type area into a field of modules — columns AND rows — separated by consistent gutters, inside defined margins. Text and images occupy whole modules. Müller-Brockmann specimens common field counts (8 / 20 / 32 fields). For the web, a 12-column grid + 8px baseline is a robust general default; a 6×6 or 4×8 modular field grid when you want visible rows too.
  • Baseline grid. Vertical rhythm is sacred: leading = a whole multiple of the baseline unit, and every element snaps to it. This is what makes facing columns and images line up across the page.
  • Typography. A grotesque sans (Akzidenz-Grotesk / Helvetica; on the web Inter, Helvetica Now, Archivo). Flush-left, ragged-right. Few sizes, large jumps in scale for hierarchy; objective, not expressive. Big numerals/data set large is a signature move.
  • Palette. Pure white paper, near-black ink, one accent — red is canonical. Avoid the warm-cream "Claude look"; never blue/purple gradients (hard house rule).
  • White space + asymmetry. Generous margins; asymmetric compositions held in tension by the grid.

Read the full file on GitHub · 111 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. 2d ago First seen · 111 lines · 160 tokens per session scan A d1a9e3253cee

Subscribe to this mod's changes

align-grid is a skill published in the GitHub repository danielvm-git/bigpowers (156 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 160 tokens to every session and 3,051 once invoked, about $0.0008 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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