canon

canon

!checklist init ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} --force

A canon is the underlying measure from which a craftsman's proportions derive — not a style applied after, but the organizing principle that makes every dimension coherent before a single mark lands. canon is the judgment spine of the atelier suite: where a frontend build has bearings to fix the boundaries before the first line of code, a design build has canon to fix the design language before the first visual value. Its product is three one-page artifacts — a design-language brief, a quantified-targets sheet, and a product-sense check — that every later lens (color, type, layout, form, graphics, motion) honors. It runs across gated stages and will not advance past a GATE until the checklist tool clears it. The gate enforces order; the substance of every judgment inside it is yours.

The governing fact: high-craft design is not defaults nudged until "ok" — it is a small set of NON-DEFAULT, QUANTIFIED decisions made before any pixel, all derived from one upstream choice: the surface's point of view. Style is derived from that point of view (POV → style); the agent's signature failure is to run it backwards — reach for a premium-looking style first and reverse-justify it — which is exactly how it lands in the default mean. An agent without guidance converges to three statistical defaults: the warm-cream editorial (off-white ground, high-contrast serif, ochre accent); the near-black neon tool (single fluorescent accent, zero radius, dense grid); the newspaper grid (hairlines, dense columns, pure neutrals). These are not choices — they are the agent's aesthetic gravity, the modal outputs of its training. None of them is wrong in principle; each is wrong as a default, because it was never decided. The craft move is to name the organizing principle first — which visual language, which archetype, what this surface is for — and then derive every subsequent call from that decision rather than from the agent's statistical center of mass.

This is where the agent era bites:

• The agent picks plausible-but-unconsidered values and feels no wrongness. It emits a warm-cream serif because that combination is overrepresented in high-engagement design content, not because it fits your surface. It reaches for rounded corners and drop shadows because those are the defaults of the popular component libraries it has seen, not because they serve your user's cognitive load. It has no nervous system to feel that a dashboard with editorial-weight type is wrong in kind, not just aesthetically suboptimal.
• The agent defaults to decoration over decision. It adds gradients, shadows, and micro-animations because they pattern-match to "polished" in its training — but "polished" on a marketing surface and "polished" on a dense data tool are entirely different objects. Motion that signals craft on a landing page is noise on a trading terminal. The agent cannot make this distinction without being told the archetype.
• The agent cannot quantify taste. It will say "high contrast" without a number, "generous spacing" without a scale, "minimal motion" without a budget. The non-default choice must be a number — a contrast floor, a density grade, a type-scale ratio — or it will dissolve into the next prompt.

Read references/non-default-and-quantified.md first — this skill's spine; the encodable techniques for taking each aesthetic dimension from "default" to "decided and measured." Then read references/surface-archetypes.md to ground the language choice in what the surface is for. The product-sense reference opens at STAGE 2.

Cross-suite lineage. canon is to atelier what bearings is to surface — the spine that fixes the irreversible early decisions before sunk cost accrues. bearings asks: which boundary, which source of truth, whose mental model? canon asks: which visual language, which archetype, what does premium mean here? They share a governing insight: the agent writes the code / pixels competently; the leverage lives in the calls it cannot make — the ones that require taste, context, and a nervous system.