Design Review Skill

design-review-skill

A Claude Skill packaging a synthesized design review knowledge base, for running a structured first pass on visual work: layouts, mockups, screens, decks, charts and diagrams, identity systems, packaging, editorial.

Where the criteria come from

The knowledge base is the output of a two-stage distillation run over a 29-book stack covering perception, typography, composition, information design, and identity practice (Arnheim, Bringhurst, Müller-Brockmann, Lupton, Tschichold, Tufte, Wheeler, Vignelli, Lidwell and others). Stage one chunks each source and extracts principles tagged by category. Stage two pools every point in a category across all books and synthesizes it into checkable criteria, written as "flag if" and "check whether" statements aimed at an AI reviewer rather than at a human reader. That framing is deliberate. It is a review layer, not a design textbook.

Three conventions carry through to the output and matter when reading it:

• (TESTED) marks a point the sources back with evidence rather than practitioner preference.
• (COUNTERINTUITIVE) marks a point that cuts against a common assumption, which is where most of the value sits.
• Disagreements between sources are preserved and labeled rather than averaged into a single recommendation. Serif versus sans for body text, a prescribed eye path versus simultaneous comprehension of the whole, contemporary expression versus timelessness. The skill is instructed to surface these as tensions instead of picking a side.

Contents

• SKILL.md — the skill definition, including section routing and the review procedure Claude follows.
• reference/design_knowledge_base.md — the criteria themselves, in six sections: Perception, Typography, Composition, Information Design, Identity Systems, Applied Formats.

Install

The folder name has to match the `name` field in `SKILL.md`, and `SKILL.md` has to sit directly inside it rather than one level down.

For