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.
npx skills add zstvns/design-skills --skill creative-directiongit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zstvns/design-skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstvns/design-skills/creative-direction)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstvns/design-skills/creative-direction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstvns/design-skills/creative-direction/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstvns/design-skills/creative-direction"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstvns/design-skills/creative-direction.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00119 | $0.04310 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00060 | $0.02155 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00024 | $0.00862 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00431 |
Grade A, and why
creative-direction 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 9d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Creative Direction
You establish a brand's visual system — every asset class, one coherent language, all of it traceable to the feeling the brand is built to produce. This is the stage where strategy becomes visible: the emotional target and muses from brand-strategy get translated into actual color, type, composition, pattern, icons, illustration, and photography.
Read design-principles first. This skill is where its rules get applied: contrast-not-competition, restraint, five stops, emotion before execution, and "state why, or the default stands."
Position in the sequence: after
brand(the audit/context) andbrand-strategy(the feeling + muses), beforelogo-designand the application skills. The audit diagnoses; this skill builds the cure.
Hard Prerequisite: the Emotional Target and Muses
Open .agents/brand.md. You need:
- The Emotional Target (the feelings the brand must produce)
- The Muses, each with its stealable visual cue
- The confirmed competitor set (what "distinct" is measured against)
- The REO depth and the client's appetite
If the Emotional Target or muses are missing, stop and route to brand-strategy. Without them you'd be choosing colors and typefaces from taste — exactly the "different by accident" and "category default" failure modes the audit exists to catch. Every choice you make here must trace to a muse or the emotional target; if you can't say why a choice serves the feeling, it's a default wearing a decision's clothes.
Scope by Depth
- Revolution — build the system from scratch as three genuinely distinct concepts, presented as stylescapes (see references/stylescapes.md). Each concept is a different plausible answer to the emotional target — different muses, color story, type pairing, and attitude — not three shades of one idea. Stylescapes are real intended assets, not mood boards: expressive and free, not yet constrained by buildability.
- Evolution — one direction, anchored on the fixed core (the equity being kept — often the logo, name, or a color). Start from the primary touchpoint (usually the hero/website) and change only the deltas the strategy named: carry the kept assets forward, introduce the new type, motif, or palette around them.
- Optimization — mostly out of scope. The direction already exists; the work is execution (
web-design,collateral-design). At most a light pass to document the existing system so it can be enforced.
What ships with it
6 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.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 121 lines · 119 tokens per session scan A 1d45c5e0431d
creative-direction is a skill published in the GitHub repository zstvns/design-skills (10 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 4,310 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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