art-director

art-director is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from hcaiano/skills. It costs 43 tokens per session (712 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided process for exploring visual directions for an interface, product, campaign, or brand before implementation. It uses generated visual concepts and user choices to narrow the direction.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate references, generate visual concepts, compare directions, and choose a design system. It can also use existing brand and product context when available.
Why use it?
It helps resolve major visual decisions before code is written. It keeps exploration separate from implementation so the chosen direction is deliberate.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: disable-model-invocation in frontmatter, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to investigate references, generate visual concepts, compare directions, and choose a design system. It can also use existing brand and product context when available.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hcaiano/skills/art-director
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 hcaiano/skills --skill art-director
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hcaiano/skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 art-director

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hcaiano/skills/art-director"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hcaiano/skills/art-director.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 712 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00043 $0.00712
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00356
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00142
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00071

Measured 12d ago against content hash 371cc757a830, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

art-director 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 12d 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.

skills/art-director/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Art Director

Explore visual directions, curate them with the user, and converge on one defensible choice. Do not implement the product while this skill is active.

Compose, do not copy

  • Read and use imagegen for every generated concept. Its generation, editing, validation, and save-path rules own the image work.
  • For a brand or identity exploration, read brandkit only after a direction has earned a system proof. Do not generate a brand board for every early idea.
  • Run intake as a grilling conversation: investigate facts yourself, ask decisions one at a time, include your recommended answer, and wait for the user's reply. No separate intake skill is required.
  • If the current runtime cannot generate images, use pair to give a Codex peer the generation brief. When image generation is available directly, Herdr is unnecessary.
  • Obey the current project's agent, product, brand, and design-system instructions.

Workflow

  1. Inspect. Determine whether this is blank-slate or constrained by an existing brand. Read available references, product context, design tokens, and existing surfaces before asking questions.
  2. Intake. Resolve the audience, surface, communication goal, required content, format, references, anti-references, hard brand constraints, and decision deadline. Ask only what materially changes the exploration.
  3. Frame directions. Name three to five concrete visual premises. Each direction needs a different underlying rule for composition, hierarchy, imagery, and mood. "More options" is not a direction.
  4. Generate breadth. Use one imagegen call per direction. Keep the functional content and format constant so the visual ideas are comparable. Preserve an established identity; for blank-slate work, explore a genuine range. Keep the exact prompt for every output.
  5. Curate. Inspect every image. Identify it by filename or stable ID and explain what works, what fails, and which reusable trait it contributes. Maintain a shortlist and a rejected-pattern list. Ask the user for the next decision one question at a time.
  6. Refine. Generate two or three variants of the strongest direction. Change one named trait at a time instead of remixing everything.
  7. Prove the system. Stress-test the winner on an adjacent page, state, or asset. For identity work, use brandkit to create one coherent system board from the selected direction.
  8. Hand off. Return the selected asset paths, exact prompts, visual rules, rejected patterns, and remaining trade-offs. Save project-bound outputs in the workspace according to imagegen; preview-only outputs may remain inline.

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 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. 12d ago First seen · 62 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 371cc757a830

Subscribe to this mod's changes

art-director is a skill published in the GitHub repository hcaiano/skills (3 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 712 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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