Design & Taste — a merged skill for Claude Code / Cowork

One installable skill that gives Claude elite frontend design taste: it builds interfaces that feel premium instead of generic, with stronger typography, color, spacing, motion, component states, and accessibility — and a built-in critique pass so it doesn't stop at the first draft.

Where it comes from

This is a synthesis of three community design skills, deduplicated and merged. All three share the same anti-slop, taste-first lineage; each contributed its unique strength:

Source	What it contributed to this skill
emilkowalski/skill (emil-design-eng)	The craft philosophy ("taste is trained", "unseen details compound") and the deep motion/animation craft → reference/motion.md
pbakaus/impeccable	The crisp design rules, the OKLCH color strategy, the absolute anti-slop bans, and the modern interaction-states reference → core rules + reference/anti-slop.md + reference/interaction-states.md
leonxlnx/taste-skill (design-taste-frontend)	Reading the brief before designing, the three intensity dials, honest design-system selection, GSAP scroll skeletons, and the full pre-flight matrix → reference/design-systems.md + reference/pre-flight.md

Rather than install three overlapping skills (they repeat the same mindset), this combines them: one self-contained SKILL.md core plus five focused reference files pulled faithfully from the originals.

Structure

design-taste/
├── SKILL.md                       # Synthesized core: philosophy, Iron Law, brief-read, core rules, file index
└── reference/
    ├── motion.md                  # Animation craft (emil): easing, springs, clip-path, stagger, perf, Sonner
    ├── interaction-states.md      # Components (impeccable): 8 states, focus rings, dialog/popover, keyboard nav
    ├── anti-slop.md               # The ban + AI-tells catalogue (impeccable + taste-skill)
    ├── design-systems.md          # Brief read, dials, real-vs-fake design systems, GSAP skeletons (taste-skill)
    └── pre-flight.md              # Review format + full pre-flight matrix (emil + taste-skill)

Install

Repo: https://github.com/h3nryprod01/design-taste

From GitHub (recommended):

# via the agent-skills CLI (works for Claude Code, Cowork, Cursor, etc.)
npx skills add h3nryprod01/design-taste

# or clone straight into your personal skills dir
git clone https://github.com/h3nryprod01/design-taste.git ~/.claude/skills/design-taste

Claude Code — global (all projects):

cp -r design-taste ~/.claude/skills/

Claude Code — single project:

mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r design-taste .claude/skills/

Claude Desktop / Web / Cowork: zip the design-taste folder and upload it under Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

Usage

It activates automatically on design requests — "make this landing page look better", "build a premium pricing page", "polish this dashboard's UI", "improve the animations", "this feels like AI slop, fix it" — or invoke explicitly: "use the design-taste skill to…".

Credits & license

This is a mixed-license package, because the upstream sources use different licenses. The split is documented precisely in NOTICE (per-file provenance map).

Part	Source	License
SKILL.md, README.md (new synthesis)	—	MIT (LICENSE)
reference/motion.md	emilkowalski/skill	MIT
reference/interaction-states.md, reference/anti-slop.md (Part 1)	pbakaus/impeccable	Apache-2.0 (LICENSES/Apache-2.0.txt)
reference/anti-slop.md (Part 2), reference/design-systems.md, reference/pre-flight.md	leonxlnx/taste-skill	MIT

The original synthesis is © 2026 Nguyễn Phú Cường under MIT. The impeccable-derived files remain under Apache-2.0 (impeccable itself derives, in part, from Anthropic's frontend-design skill, also Apache-2.0 — attribution preserved transitively in NOTICE). When redistributing, keep LICENSE, LICENSES/Apache-2.0.txt, and NOTICE together.