better-ui

better-ui is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from memi-design/design-skills. It costs 82 tokens per session (1,694 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of design guidelines for making user interfaces feel polished, including typography, spacing, borders, shadows, animations, and interaction details.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when building or reviewing interface components, adding hover states or animations, or improving visual details in frontend code.
Why use it?
It helps find the small visual and interactive problems that can make an interface feel unfinished or difficult to use.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when building or reviewing interface components, adding hover states or animations, or improving visual details in frontend code.

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

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/memi-design/design-skills/better-ui"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/memi-design/design-skills/better-ui.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 82 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,694 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 $0.00082 $0.01694
Opus 5 $0.00041 $0.00847
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00339
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00169

Measured 12d ago against content hash 39bd97b43f81, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

better-ui 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/better-ui/SKILL.md · 128 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Details that make interfaces feel better

Great interfaces rarely come from a single thing. It's usually a collection of small details that compound into a great experience. Apply these principles when building or reviewing UI code.

Typography (text wrapping, font smoothing, tabular numbers, spacing) is covered by the better-typography skill; use that for anything text-related.

Custom shaders, dithering, particles, and GPU-driven distortions are outside this broad polish workflow. Route their implementation to shader-design-engineering and their evidence-backed review to creative-rendering-audit.

Quick Reference

Category When to Use
Surfaces Border radius, optical alignment, shadows, image outlines, hit areas
Animations Interruptible animations, enter/exit transitions, icon animations, scale on press
Performance Transition specificity, will-change usage

Core Principles

1. Concentric Border Radius

Outer radius = inner radius + padding. Mismatched radii on nested elements is the most common thing that makes interfaces feel off.

2. Optical Over Geometric Alignment

When geometric centering looks off, align optically. Buttons with icons, play triangles, and asymmetric icons all need manual adjustment.

3. Shadows Over Borders

Layer multiple transparent box-shadow values for natural depth. Shadows adapt to any background; solid borders don't.

4. Interruptible Animations

Use CSS transitions for interactive state changes: they can be interrupted mid-animation. Reserve keyframes for staged sequences that run once.

5. Split and Stagger Enter Animations

Don't animate a single container. Break content into semantic chunks and stagger each with ~100ms delay.

6. Subtle Exit Animations

Use a small fixed translateY instead of full height. Exits should be softer than enters.

7. Contextual Icon Animations

Animate icons with opacity, scale, and blur instead of toggling visibility. Use exactly these values: scale from 0.25 to 1, opacity from 0 to 1, blur from 4px to 0px. If the project has motion or framer-motion in package.json, use transition: { type: "spring", duration: 0.3, bounce: 0 }; bounce must always be 0. If no motion library is installed, keep both icons in the DOM (one absolute-positioned) and cross-fade with CSS transitions using cubic-bezier(0.2, 0, 0, 1); this gives both enter and exit animations without any dependency.

Read the full file on GitHub · 128 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. 12d ago First seen · 128 lines · 82 tokens per session scan A 39bd97b43f81

Subscribe to this mod's changes

better-ui is a skill published in the GitHub repository memi-design/design-skills (7 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 82 tokens to every session and 1,694 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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