apple-design-language

apple-design-language is a skill for Claude Code from markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills. It costs 0 tokens per session (1,529 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing and interaction guide for making iOS, iPadOS, and macOS interfaces feel native, covering user-facing copy, forms, loading states, errors, and empty screens.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or review button labels, alerts, validation messages, forms, focus behaviour, loading states, empty states, and error messages.
Why use it?
It helps resolve the small wording and interaction decisions that strongly affect how clear and consistent an Apple-platform app feels.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the apple-dev-skills plugin — 62 skills, 25 commands, 7 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to write or review button labels, alerts, validation messages, forms, focus behaviour, loading states, empty states, and error messages.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills/apple-design-language
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 markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills --skill apple-design-language
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install apple-dev-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 62 skills, 25 commands, 7 agents.

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 apple-design-language

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills/apple-design-language.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills/apple-design-language)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills/apple-design-language"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills/apple-design-language.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,529 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 $0.00000 $0.01529
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00764
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00306
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00153

Measured 8d ago against content hash 4b1effaa2bae, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apple-design-language 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 8d 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.

platforms/claude/skills/apple-design-language/SKILL.md · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apple Design Language

The editorial layer for Apple apps on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS: the parts of "feels Apple-quality" that aren't a spacing number — copy, interaction states, empty/error states, and the judgment of when to follow versus tastefully break the Human Interface Guidelines. Think in capabilities (touch vs. pointer, compact vs. regular vs. window), not device names.

This skill is the entry point to the design language. It owns four things and routes everything else.

Orientation index

Concern Where it lives
Spacing, optical alignment, padding, corner concentricity, hairlines, depth swiftui-micro-craft
Motion timing, named springs, gestures, haptics swiftui-micro-craft
Type scale mechanics, SF Symbol sizing/weight, Dynamic Type plumbing swiftui-micro-craft
Color, design tokens, Liquid Glass, system materials apple-design
VoiceOver, Dynamic Type coverage, tap-target sizing ios-accessibility
Adaptive layout, size classes, multi-platform navigation cross-platform-adaptivity
UX writing & copy this skill → references/ux-writing.md
Forms, validation, focus, loading, control states this skill → references/interaction-states.md
Empty & error states this skill → references/empty-error-states.md
When to follow vs. break HIG; quality-vs-slop judgment this skill (below)
Worked examples of tasteful HIG deviation this skill → references/exemplars.md

HIG is the floor, not the ceiling

The Human Interface Guidelines encode what is safe and approvable. Meet that floor everywhere. But Apple's own best apps — and most Apple Design Award winners — exceed or selectively break the defaults where it serves the user. "HIG-compliant" and "great" are not the same target. Your job: clear the floor without exception, then raise the ceiling deliberately.

Deviation decision gates

Deviate from a HIG default only when all four hold:

  1. Named benefit — you can state the user benefit in one sentence that isn't "looks better," "feels modern," or "cleaner."
  2. Survives the slop check — it is not one of the numbered tells below (and will pass swiftui-design-check once that exists).
  3. Survives assistive tech — still correct under VoiceOver and Dynamic Type at AX5 (see ios-accessibility).
  4. Systematic — applied as a rule across the app, not a one-off that creates an inconsistency.

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 8d ago First seen · 89 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 4b1effaa2bae

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apple-design-language is a skill published in the GitHub repository markdavidgan/apple-dev-skills (5 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 1,529 tokens. 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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