design-system

A set of visual rules for making software diagrams clear and accessible. It covers colors, layout, typography, and other presentation choices.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating SVG, Mermaid, Excalidraw, or D2 diagrams to guide color choices, composition, labels, and accessibility.
Why use it?
It helps diagrams communicate structure and meaning consistently instead of using colors and layouts only for decoration.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/zate/cc-plugins/design-system
Any agent
npx skills add Zate/cc-plugins --skill design-system
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Zate/cc-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 54 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,595 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00054 $0.02595
Opus 5 $0.00027 $0.01298
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00519
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00260

Measured 2d ago against content hash 74da706813ad, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-system 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 2d 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.

plugins/diagrams/skills/design-system/SKILL.md · 239 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 239 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diagram Design System

Universal design principles for professional-quality diagrams. These rules apply regardless of output format (SVG, Mermaid, Excalidraw, D2). Format-specific skills handle syntax; this skill handles aesthetics and composition.

Color

Palette Size

Use 3-5 colors plus grays per diagram. Maximum 7 distinct colors. Beyond that, humans cannot distinguish and remember meanings. If you need more categories, use shade variations within a hue family rather than adding new hues.

Semantic Color Conventions

Use color to convey meaning, not decoration. These associations are widely understood in software engineering:

Concept Color Light Theme Hex Use For
Platform / Core Blue #2563EB Primary system components, APIs, services
Data / Storage Blue (darker) #1E40AF Databases, data stores, caches
Success / Healthy Green #16A34A Active states, successful flows, admin
Security / Error Red #DC2626 Threats, errors, denied paths, trust boundaries
Warning / Caution Amber #D97706 Deprecations, risks, attention needed
Compute / Processing Purple #7C3AED Processing nodes, AI/ML, observability
External / Third-Party Teal #0891B2 External systems, integrations, users
Inactive / Deprecated Gray #6B7280 Disabled, archived, low-priority
Infrastructure Slate #475569 Foundational platform, network

Color-Blind Safe Palette

8% of males have color vision deficiency. Always follow these rules:

  1. Never rely on color alone -- pair with shape, pattern, label, or icon
  2. Avoid red-green adjacency without additional differentiation
  3. Preferred safe palettes:
    • IBM: #648FFF, #785EF0, #DC267F, #FE6100, #FFB000
    • Wong: #E69F00, #56B4E9, #009E73, #F0E442, #0072B2, #D55E00, #CC79A7

Contrast (WCAG AA)

  • Normal text on backgrounds: contrast ratio >= 4.5:1
  • Large text (18px+ or 14px bold): >= 3:1
  • Non-text elements (borders, icons, chart segments): >= 3:1 against adjacent colors
  • White text on gradient fills (#0052CC, #006644, #5243AA) meets AA
  • Never place mid-tone text on mid-tone backgrounds

Read the full file on GitHub · 239 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. 2d ago First seen · 239 lines · 54 tokens per session scan A 74da706813ad

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-system is a skill published in the GitHub repository Zate/cc-plugins (10 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 54 tokens to every session and 2,595 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens