What is design-distill?

A visual simplification pass for an overdecorated user interface. It removes unnecessary layers such as nested cards, repeated headings, decorative gradients, extra shadows, and excess borders while keeping the information structure.

Use it when simplifying a UI, reducing visual clutter, flattening containers, or removing redundant visual elements before a final design-polish pass.

It reduces visual noise that can make a screen harder to understand. It separates removing decoration from adding polish or removing unused code.

design-distill — Skill for Claude Code by hamzaPixl

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 hamzaPixl/pixl-ai --skill design-distill

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hamzaPixl/pixl-ai

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pixl-crew, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 93 skills, 14 agents, 6 hooks.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hamzapixl/pixl-ai/design-distill/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hamzapixl/pixl-ai/design-distill)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hamzapixl/pixl-ai/design-distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hamzapixl/pixl-ai/design-distill/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hamzapixl/pixl-ai/design-distill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hamzapixl/pixl-ai/design-distill.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 68 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,613 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00068	$0.01613
Opus 5	$0.00034	$0.00807
Sonnet 5	$0.00014	$0.00323
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00161

Measured 11d ago against content hash 002e9765b64c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-distill 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 11d 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.

packages/crew/skills/design-distill/SKILL.md · 158 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 158 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Ruthless simplification pass. Removes decorative noise, flattens nested containers, consolidates color and elevation, and strips redundant headers/labels. Preserves information hierarchy, brand accent, and semantic color. Use before /design-polish when the UI is fundamentally over-decorated — polishing overdesigned UI just polishes the noise.

How this differs:

/design-polish — adds craft (focus states, micro-interactions). This skill — removes noise.
/code-reduction — removes unused code. This skill — removes unused visual weight.
/design-variants — explores new directions. This skill — prunes the current direction.

Required References

Read before starting:

references/frontend/design/anti-patterns.md — overdesign tells
references/frontend/design/craft-process.md — "what to keep" heuristics
references/frontend/design/spatial-design.md — whitespace as a design element

Principles

Remove:

Decorative gradients (backgrounds, borders, text) with no semantic meaning
Sparkline decorations, random dots, ambient floating elements
Nested cards (card inside card inside card)
Redundant headers (section header + card header + item header saying similar things)
Excessive shadows (shadow-2xl stacked on shadow-lg, glow effects everywhere)
Multi-layer borders (border + outline + ring all at once)
More than 3 accent colors — consolidate to 1 brand + 1 accent + neutrals
Icon-for-icon's-sake (decorative icons next to every label)
Badges, pills, and chips added for visual weight, not information

Keep:

Information hierarchy (H1 > H2 > body still reads clearly)
Brand accent color (one, distinctive, consistent)
Semantic colors (success/warn/error/info — never merge these)
Functional borders (input borders, table cell separators)
One shadow token for elevation (usually shadow-sm or shadow-md)
Interactive affordances (hover/focus states — those are /design-polish territory)

Step 1: Inventory Visual Weight

Read the full file on GitHub · 158 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.

11d ago First seen · 158 lines · 68 tokens per session scan A 002e9765b64c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-distill is a skill published in the GitHub repository hamzaPixl/pixl-ai (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 68 tokens to every session and 1,613 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.

Design and UX

webgl-holographic-foil

A self-contained WebGL2 hero: thin-film interference over a crushed-foil surface whose palette shifts with the viewing angle; move the cursor to tilt the film.

nexu-io/open-design · 41 tokens

html-ppt-hermes-cyber-terminal

OpenDesign + BYOK: choosing and wiring your own model, hands-on — cost, quality, and the routing decision. Built as a decision-grade AI literacy deck for engineers, IT, applied-AI teams.

nexu-io/open-design · 53 tokens

html-ppt-taste-brutalist

16:9 HTML deck in tactical-telemetry / CRT-terminal taste. Deactivated-CRT charcoal slides, white-phosphor monospace, hazard-red accent, scanline overlay, ASCII syntax, density over decoration. Distilled from Leonxlnx/taste-skill brutalist-skill (Tactical Telemetry mode).

nexu-io/open-design · 78 tokens

design-distill