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

Implementation Guidance

Anti-Patterns

Review Checklist