design-foundations

design-foundations is a skill for Claude Code from kazdenc/builder-skills. It costs 43 tokens per session (941 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A product-design framework that examines a product in five layers, from user goals and features to structure, layout, and visual appearance.

In plain words
What is it for?
Planning, designing, or evaluating a product’s user experience from strategy through interface details.
Why use it?
It provides a way to organize design decisions and connect what a product should do with how people use it.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

Good fit Planning, designing, or evaluating a product’s user experience from strategy through interface details.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kazdenc/builder-skills/design-foundations
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 kazdenc/builder-skills --skill design-foundations
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kazdenc/builder-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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-foundations

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kazdenc/builder-skills/design-foundations"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kazdenc/builder-skills/design-foundations.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 941 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 $0.00941
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.00470
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00188
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00094

Measured 9d ago against content hash 071ef52e0522, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-foundations 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.

.claude/skills/design/frameworks/design-foundations/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Five Planes of User Experience

A product's user experience is built in layers, from abstract to concrete. Each plane builds on the one below it. Decisions made on lower planes constrain and inform decisions on higher planes.

┌─────────────────────────────────┐
│          SURFACE                │  Visual/sensory design
│  ┌───────────────────────────┐  │
│  │        SKELETON           │  │  Layout, navigation, information design
│  │  ┌─────────────────────┐  │  │
│  │  │     STRUCTURE        │  │  │  Interaction design, information architecture
│  │  │  ┌───────────────┐   │  │  │
│  │  │  │    SCOPE       │  │  │  │  Features, content requirements
│  │  │  │  ┌─────────┐   │  │  │  │
│  │  │  │  │STRATEGY │   │  │  │  │  User needs, product objectives
│  │  │  │  └─────────┘   │  │  │  │
│  │  │  └───────────────┘   │  │  │
│  │  └─────────────────────┘  │  │
│  └───────────────────────────┘  │
└─────────────────────────────────┘

The Duality

Every product has two dimensions that run through all five planes:

  • Functionality side — The product as a tool (tasks, features, interaction)
  • Information side — The product as information (content, structure, presentation)
Plane Functionality Information
Strategy Product objectives User needs
Scope Functional specifications Content requirements
Structure Interaction design Information architecture
Skeleton Interface design Navigation + information design
Surface Sensory design Sensory design

How to Use This Framework

Diagnosing Problems

When something feels wrong with a product, identify which plane the problem lives on:

  • Users don't understand what the product is for → Strategy
  • Features are missing, bloated, or misaligned with goals → Scope
  • Users get lost, confused by flows, or can't find things → Structure
  • Users see the right content but can't interact with it effectively → Skeleton
  • The interface looks bad, feels cheap, or sends wrong signals → Surface

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files 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 · 82 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 071ef52e0522

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-foundations is a skill published in the GitHub repository kazdenc/builder-skills (45 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 941 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 2026-08-30.

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