Design Skills

AI agent skills for the designer's craft. Brand diagnosis and audit, brand strategy, creative direction, logo design, and application across web, collateral, and motion — with a shared context document so you never re-explain your brand.

The principles are universal — good design, stated with authority, usable on any brand. They are not tied to one agency's process.

Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other Agent Skills hosts.

Install

# In Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add zstvns/design-skills
/plugin install designskills@designskills

Any other Agent Skills host — clone and symlink into the cross-agent skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/zstvns/design-skills.git ~/code/design-skills
mkdir -p your-project/.agents/skills
for s in ~/code/design-skills/skills/*; do
  ln -s "$s" "your-project/.agents/skills/$(basename "$s")"
done

For Claude Code without the plugin, use .claude/skills/ in place of .agents/skills/.

There are no required dependencies — every skill runs as-is. A few optional connections make the output substantially better; see INSTALL.md.

Getting started — 5 minutes

1. Install (above).

2. Run /brand and give it a URL.

/brand yourbrand.com

It crawls the site, follows links out to social and press, gathers the brand's existing assets itself, confirms the competitor set with you, runs a nine-category audit, and presents a full scorecard plus a verdict: Revolution, Evolution, or Optimization — how much should actually change.

The one input it can't infer is your appetite (incremental refinement vs. transformational change). Give it if you know it; it drives the recommended path.

3. Follow where it routes you. The skills know their own sequence and hand off to each other. You don't need to memorize the map below — brand will tell you what's next.

4. Read one SKILL.md to see the pattern. Each skill is a craft document you can also just read and execute by hand; the automation is a side effect.

The Context Documents

Everything in this library reads from and writes to plain markdown in your project's .agents/ directory. Collect once, use everywhere — the agent never asks you to re-explain your colors, type, or direction.

Document	Written by	What it holds
`.agents/brand.md`	`brand`	The keystone. The distilled source of truth every skill reads first — emotional target, muses, color, type, pattern & texture, illustration, iconography, photography, logo, and the fixed-core / flexible-range latitude.
`.agents/brand-strategy.md`	`brand-strategy`	The full coaching record behind the distillation — your verbatim answers, the muses with their stealable cues, the pressure-tested personality, the concept directions. `brand.md` gets the synthesis; this keeps the reasoning.
`.agents/design.md`	`creative-direction`	The full creative-direction spec — concepts, color system and tokens, documented photo / graphic / icon / type styles with asset sources, the motif and signature element, and the why behind every choice. It's a living record: `logo-design` appends the approved mark, `motion-design` the built motion system, and the application skills their adopted libraries and notes.
`.agents/assets/logo/`	`logo-design`	The locked logo files themselves — lockup · icon · square avatar · app icon, each in SVG/PNG/JPEG across the colorway set. Downstream skills place these files; they never redraw the mark.
`.agents/product-marketing.md`	external	Positioning, ICP, voice, and the competitive landscape — from the marketingskills library. Read, never written. If present, the brand audit pulls its competitor set from here instead of guessing.

Nothing here is required up front. Each skill creates what's missing or tells you which one to run first.

The Sequence

Design runs as a build, not a flat menu. brand is the diagnostic front door — it runs the REO check (how much is changing) and routes to the right path:

                        ┌─ Revolution  → brand-strategy → creative-direction → … (build from scratch)
brand  (diagnose REO) ──┼─ Evolution   → capture, then strategy on the deltas → creative-direction
                        └─ Optimization → capture + audit → straight to the medium skills (fix execution)

then:  logo-design
       → APPLICATION (web · collateral · motion)

brand-strategy is the heavy generative path the diagnostic routes to — in an Optimization it's skipped entirely. That's the line between them: brand always runs; brand-strategy only when something is actually being defined or changed.

Stage	Skill	Role
Foundation	`brand`	The diagnostic front door: autonomous asset gathering, a nine-category brand audit scored against the confirmed competitor set (creative direction caps the rest; the foundation drives the REO verdict), and the keystone context doc. Always runs first.
Foundation	`design-principles`	Universal craft beliefs every other skill inherits — designed-vs-assembled, hierarchy, restraint, contrast, coherence-not-repetition.
Strategy	`brand-strategy`	The heavy generative path `brand` routes to: what the brand should feel like, the muses it steals from, the distinct concepts, the fixed-core / flexible-range latitude. Skipped in an Optimization.
Identity	`creative-direction`	Translates the emotional target + muses into the concrete visual system — color, type, composition, pattern & texture, icons, illustration, photography — as one coherent language, validated against the audit's own bar. Three stylescapes for a Revolution; anchored deltas for an Evolution.
Identity	`logo-design`	The core mark — Simple, Appropriate, Distinct (SAD), each judged in context: distinct vs. competitors, appropriate to the feeling, simple across every implementation. Delivers locked asset files, not a description.
Application	`web-design`	Applying the brand to a live, conversion-focused site with real copy — designed and built in custom code, giving the words their proper emphasis. Rhythm as a vocabulary of section types, one reserved CTA color, faithful replication when referencing a live site.
Application	`collateral-design`	Every fixed-format piece that isn't a website — decks, one-pagers, social posts, OG images, ads, print. Ships as a true-size viewer plus real exports. Coherence across the family, not one cloned template.
Application	`motion-design`	The twelve principles of animation applied to UI motion in custom code — micro-interactions, transitions, entrances, scroll and hover behavior — with weight, emotion, and restraint. Motion carries feeling; not fade-up-on-everything.

Which skill do I invoke when?

I want to...	Skill
Find out how good my brand actually is, and how much should change	`brand`
Figure out what my brand should feel like	`brand-strategy`
Pick my colors, type, and visual language	`creative-direction`
Design or critique a logo	`logo-design`
Design and build a website or landing page	`web-design`
Make a deck, one-pager, social post, OG image, ad, or print piece	`collateral-design`
Add animation, hover states, or scroll behavior	`motion-design`
Understand why a design feels off when I can't name it	`design-principles`

Core Beliefs (the 30-second version)

Design serves the message; the message comes first. Copy before design, design before build.
Defaults, not laws. Break any rule — but state why, or the default stands.
Designed vs. assembled. Rank what matters, then give it space and scale to match.
Hierarchy is the job. Most weak design isn't ugly, it's flat.
Restraint is a feature. Protect the few things that carry the message by removing what competes.
Emotion before execution. Know the feeling first. Steal it from specific muses.
Consistency is coherence, not repetition. A piece can flex off the visual system and still be on-brand — if it stays true to the strategy.
Not perfection — better than it was.

Using the Skills

Fully self-serve. Everything here is built to be run end-to-end by you and your own AI agent — the audit, the strategy coaching, the creative direction, all of it. There's no agency, workshop, or consultant behind this repo, and nothing to book; iterate with your agent, keep your context in .agents/, and go as deep as your brand needs.

Invoke any skill by name (e.g. /brand, /logo-design). Start at brand for any new project; the skills cross-reference each other and tell you where to go next.

Roadmap

Eight skills ship today. Deliberately not shipped yet:

Skill	Why it's waiting
`art-direction`	Sourcing and generating the actual bespoke visual assets. Held for v2 because it can't exist without generative tooling connected — a raster image or video generator (Midjourney, Higgsfield, Flora, GPT Image, Gemini/Imagen) that has to sit outside this library. Until it ships, `creative-direction` owns asset direction and hands you prompt packs. See INSTALL.md.
`design-critique`	Judging any artifact against the emotional target and the latitude — including whether a deviation is a legitimate flex or a drift. For now, run that judgement against `.agents/brand.md` yourself; `design-principles` carries the flex-vs-drift reasoning.
`email-design` · `social-design`	Folded into `collateral-design` for now, which already covers social posts, OG images, and email graphics as fixed formats. These split out only if the mediums earn their own depth.
`brand-naming`	Naming a brand or product is a separate discipline from designing one.

See VERSIONS.md for per-skill versions and CHANGELOG.md for release history.

Related libraries

Sibling to Corey Haines' makerskills and marketingskills — this library is modeled on their structure: a foundational context layer, then strategy, then medium-specific execution. If you have marketingskills installed, the design skills read .agents/product-marketing.md for audience, voice, positioning, and the competitor set rather than duplicating any of it.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.