Muse Skill — Design skill for Claude Code

Muse

**A Claude Code skill for design direction that gets past the obvious idea and stays inside your design system.**

Ask a model for "something more original" and it reaches for the cheapest levers: it changes the colours and the typeface, or it dresses the page up as a ticket, a map or a dashboard. Muse closes those levers. Your brand's materials stay locked, the category's clichés are crossed out before the first idea, and the only thing left to move is the idea itself: what the page shows, what happens in the first three seconds, and why the visitor wants the product afterwards.


*One of four motion comps Muse produced for Lanework, a fictional task tracker. The design system is the product's own; the idea is new.*

---

Why Muse gets past the obvious

Muse runs six mechanisms that keep the work from sliding back to the usual answer.

1. **The usual is named and excluded before the first idea.** Muse writes down what the category always ships and its predictable opposite, and crosses both out. They are not bad; they are taken. *In the example:* a screenshot in a browser frame over a gradient blob, "All your work in one place", three feature cards; and the opposite, a black terminal page. The category default scored 5 out of 25.

2. **Width, not variations of one thought.** The list is long and mixed: 20–25 directions across ten idea types (product as object, transformation, demonstration, moment of use, tension, a line of copy, a scale fact, a social moment, a reveal, and a metaphor last), at most four per type. *In the example:* 21 directions across all ten types.

3. **Randomness from outside.** A model is predictable: given the same task it keeps shipping the same top concept. So about a quarter of the list is built from an external random string that picks an idea type, a moment in the buyer's life, a product fact and one constraint (for instance "the hea