design-language

design-language is a skill for Claude Code from vidhunnan/agentic-skills. It costs 150 tokens per session (3,764 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guided interview that records the visual direction for a product or interface, including its surface, brand fit, references, rules, and preferred vocabulary.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define the look and feel of a project and create the written visual brief required before design exploration.
Why use it?
It prevents generated designs from defaulting to generic, average-looking interfaces by capturing the user's intended style before exploration begins.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Part of the design-language plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to define the look and feel of a project and create the written visual brief required before design exploration.

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

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install design-language, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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-language

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/design-language"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vidhunnan/agentic-skills/design-language.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 150 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,764 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 $0.00150 $0.03764
Opus 5 $0.00075 $0.01882
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00753
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00376

Measured 10d ago against content hash 073ea9ae316f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 10d 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/design-language/SKILL.md · 301 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 301 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

design-language

Writes the other half of the brief. design-brief captures what problem you're solving and for whom; it never asks what the thing should look like — brand appears there as one row of a constraints table. This skill captures the visual intent: the surface, the references, the rules, the words.

It exists because of a specific failure. Asked to design something with no stated visual intent, a model produces the median of everything it has seen — competent, plausible, and indistinguishable from every other generated interface. The fix is not a better prompt. It is having written down, before anything is generated, what you are aiming at and what you are aiming away from.

This doc is also the gate on design-explore. Under ADR 0022, a generating skill may not run without a written visual intent — which means the quality of this document sets the ceiling on everything generated from it.

Three rules govern this skill:

  • Ask, never propose. The user's taste is the input. The moment you supply the aesthetic — even as "a starting point to react to" — the document records your median instead of their intent, and everything downstream is judged against it. Offering one example to show the register is fine; drafting the direction and taking a "yeah, that" is not.
  • The negative does half the work. "Dark, editorial, designer-tool energy — similar to Linear, Vercel, Raycast. Not startup cliché." Strip the "not" and the references become decoration. Always get the anti-reference.
  • A constraint you can't break isn't a constraint. "Clean and modern" cannot be violated, so it cannot guide anything. "Exactly one accent colour" and "content never touches the edges — 14% horizontal, 5% vertical" can be violated, which is precisely what makes them useful to design-explore and checkable by design-critique.

Instructions

Step 0 — Detect your surface

Read the full file on GitHub · 301 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 10d ago First seen · 301 lines · 150 tokens per session scan A 073ea9ae316f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-language is a skill published in the GitHub repository vidhunnan/agentic-skills (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 150 tokens to every session and 3,764 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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