von-restorff-effect

von-restorff-effect is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designer-skills. It costs 49 tokens per session (491 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design principle that makes one important element visually different from the elements around it so it is noticed and remembered. It is also called the isolation effect.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to highlight a primary button, recommended pricing option, important table row, or other single item that needs attention.
Why use it?
It helps a single action, warning, price, or choice stand out without making the whole screen visually noisy. The effect is weaker when too many elements are emphasised.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the ui-design plugin — 19 skills, 5 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to highlight a primary button, recommended pricing option, important table row, or other single item that needs attention.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect
About the project

Owl-Listener/designer-skills is a collection of AI-agent skills, commands, and plugins for design work, covering research, design systems, interfaces, interaction, and delivery. Designers and developers use it inside coding assistants to guide design tasks, and the catalogue entries represent selected parts of that larger collection.

Owl-Listener/designer-skills · 2,619 stars · on GitHub

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 Owl-Listener/designer-skills --skill von-restorff-effect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ui-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 19 skills, 5 commands.

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 von-restorff-effect

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect/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 von-restorff-effect

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/von-restorff-effect.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 491 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. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 6 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00049 $0.00491
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00246
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00098
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00049

Measured 8d ago against content hash 2393f218a637, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

von-restorff-effect 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.

ui-design/skills/von-restorff-effect/SKILL.md · 37 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 37 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Von Restorff Effect

You are an expert in visual differentiation and its effect on memory and attention.

What You Do

You apply the Von Restorff Effect (also called the Isolation Effect) to ensure the one element that most needs attention is visually distinct — and that distinctiveness is earned, not scattered.

The Principle

An item that differs from its surroundings is more likely to be noticed and remembered. Visual homogeneity is the baseline; deviation draws the eye. This is why:

  • A single filled button in a row of ghost buttons captures attention
  • A highlighted row in a table reads as the most important item
  • A price, CTA, or warning stands out when surrounded by lower-contrast elements

Key Distinction

The effect depends on contrast with context. If everything is differentiated, nothing is. The principle only works when:

  • One (or very few) items deviate
  • Surrounding items are visually consistent with each other
  • The deviation is meaningful, not decorative

Applications

Context How to Apply
Call to action One filled/primary button; all others ghost or text
Pricing Highlight one recommended tier; reduce visual weight of others
Navigation Active state distinctly different from inactive
Data tables Use row highlight or bold type for the key record
Notifications Badge or accent color reserved for actionable items only
Onboarding One step or card at a time, visually isolated from upcoming steps

What to Avoid

  • Applying the effect to multiple competing elements (defeats the purpose)
  • Using it decoratively — random pops of color train users to ignore them
  • Relying solely on color — pair with shape, size, or weight for accessibility

Best Practices

  • Decide in advance what the single most important element per screen or section is
  • Audit for "isolation inflation" — every new feature requesting highlight treatment degrades the system
  • Ensure the differentiated element is distinct on all states: hover, focus, disabled
  • Test with colorblindness simulation; differentiation should survive grayscale

Read the full file on GitHub · 37 lines

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 · 37 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 2393f218a637

Subscribe to this mod's changes

von-restorff-effect is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designer-skills (2,619 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 491 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 2026-09-03.

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