frontend-design-direction

Frontend Design Direction

Use this skill when the work is not just making UI function, but making it feel purposeful, polished, and appropriate to the product domain.

Source: salvaged from stale community PR #1659 by linus707.

Note: ECC intentionally does not rebundle the canonical Anthropic frontend-design skill. Install that from anthropics/skills when you want the official upstream skill. This skill is the ECC-specific design-direction salvage of the useful local guidance from #1659.

When to Use

• The user asks to build a web page, app, dashboard, artifact, component, or UI.
• The user asks to make an interface more polished, distinctive, beautiful, or less generic.
• The implementation needs visual hierarchy, typography, color, motion, layout, and interaction choices.
• The current UI works but reads as flat, generic, templated, or mismatched to the audience.

Design Direction

Before coding, choose a specific direction:

1. Purpose: what job does the interface do?
2. Audience: who repeats this workflow, and what do they need to scan first?
3. Tone: utilitarian, editorial, playful, industrial, refined, technical, maximal, minimal, dense, calm, or another explicit direction.
4. Memorable detail: one design idea that makes the result feel intentional.
5. Constraints: framework, accessibility, performance, responsiveness, and existing design system.

Match the direction to the domain. A SaaS operations tool should usually be dense, quiet, and scannable. A portfolio, launch page, game, or editorial piece can be more expressive. Do not force a landing-page composition onto a tool that needs repeated daily use.

Implementation Guidance

• Build the actual usable experience as the first screen unless the user explicitly asks for marketing copy.
• Use existing project components, tokens, icon libraries, and routing patterns before introducing a new visual system.
• Use real or generated visual assets when the interface depends on images, products, places, people, gameplay, charts, or inspectable media.
• Prefer contextual typography and spacing over generic oversized hero text.
• Keep palettes multi-dimensional: avoid a UI dominated by one hue family.
• Use CSS variables or existing design tokens so the direction remains coherent across states.
• Design responsive constraints explicitly: grids, aspect ratios, min/max sizes, stable toolbars, and fixed-format controls should not shift when labels or hover states appear.
• Use motion sparingly but deliberately. Prefer high-signal transitions that clarify state over decorative animation.
• Verify text fit on mobile and desktop. Long labels must wrap or resize cleanly rather than overflowing.