design-masters

design-masters is a skill for Claude Code from HermeticOrmus/design-mastery-claude-code. It costs 54 tokens per session (2,432 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of design-masters, MIT.

A reference guide to influential designers such as Saul Bass, Massimo Vignelli, Dieter Rams, and Paula Scher. It explains their design principles, techniques, and notable work.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding visual direction, learning from well-known designers, applying their methods to current work, teaching design concepts, and choosing useful references.
Why use it?
It helps turn vague requests for design inspiration into choices grounded in established practice and design history.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the design-mastery plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Finding visual direction, learning from well-known designers, applying their methods to current work, teaching design concepts, and choosing useful references.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters
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 HermeticOrmus/design-mastery-claude-code --skill design-masters
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/HermeticOrmus/design-mastery-claude-code

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install design-mastery, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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-masters

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters/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-masters

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hermeticormus/design-mastery-claude-code/design-masters.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,432 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 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00054 $0.02432
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.01216
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00486
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00243

Measured 9d ago against content hash 8c4bb3f34642, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-masters 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 9d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to design-masters — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/design-masters/SKILL.md · 310 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 310 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Masters

Standing on the shoulders of giants. These designers didn't just create beautiful work—they articulated principles that remain relevant decades later.

When to Use This Skill

  • Seeking design inspiration with depth
  • Understanding the reasoning behind classic design
  • Applying proven approaches to modern problems
  • Teaching through historical example
  • Finding appropriate references for a design direction

The Pantheon

Saul Bass (1920-1996)

Domain: Film titles, corporate identity, posters Philosophy: "Design is thinking made visual"

Signature Techniques
  1. Geometric Reduction: Complex ideas → simple shapes
  2. Symbolic Metaphor: Literal → abstract representation
  3. Motion in Stillness: Static images implying movement
  4. Negative Space: What's left out tells the story
  5. Limited Palette: Powerful constraint
Essential Works
  • Man with the Golden Arm (1955): First film title as design
  • Vertigo (1958): Spiral as psychological symbol
  • AT&T Logo (1984): Globe lines suggesting connection
  • Minolta Logo (1981): Stylized 'm' as horizon
Apply His Lesson

Before adding detail, ask: "What's the one essential shape that captures this idea?"

Approach:
1. Identify the core concept
2. Find a visual metaphor
3. Reduce to essential geometry
4. Test if meaning survives reduction
5. Add nothing more

Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014)

Domain: Information design, corporate identity, packaging Philosophy: "If you can design one thing, you can design everything"

The Vignelli Canon
  1. Semantics: What does it mean?
  2. Syntactics: How is it structured?
  3. Pragmatics: How does it function in context?
  4. Discipline: Constraint breeds creativity
  5. Appropriateness: Fit context, not ego
  6. Ambiguity: Eliminate it
  7. Design is One: Universal principles apply everywhere
  8. Visual Power: Strength through simplicity
  9. Intellectual Elegance: Clever, not complicated
  10. Timelessness: Enduring over fashionable
  11. Responsibility: Design affects lives
  12. Equity: Quality for all, not just elites

Read the full file on GitHub · 310 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. 9d ago First seen · 310 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 8c4bb3f34642

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-masters is a skill published in the GitHub repository HermeticOrmus/design-mastery-claude-code (12 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,432 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to design-masters, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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