Taste Skill

tasteskill v2

A page built by a model usually looks like the average of every page the model has seen: a centred headline over three lines, a little label above it, a row of icon cards, a soft gradient, a few thin rules and a monospace caption. Nothing in it is wrong and nothing in it was decided.

This skill replaces those defaults with decisions, in four ways:

1. A script deals the directions, you choose among them. Asked to invent a look, a model picks the category default every time. scripts/draw.mjs deals three of twenty researched directions; you choose the one that carries the subject's idea, and the script then deals its type system, palette, hero and section compositions from a library distilled from 247 real sites.
2. The idea comes from the subject. In the study, what separated the best sites from the forgettable ones was a concept taken from the thing itself, not the styling.
3. A house style with no ornaments, measured in a real browser by scripts/inspect.mjs, so the rules are checked rather than hoped for.
4. You look at what you made. Screenshots at three widths, a juror's rubric, fix, look again.

One warning learned in testing. Taking the ornaments away is only half the job; a page that has lost its labels, rules and cards and gained nothing in their place reads as thin, and blind jurors rightly prefer a richer page with tells over an empty page without them. The other half is substance: type set larger, whole fields of colour, real pictures of this subject's world (found or drawn), and every section carrying its full content. The skill is built to give you that; do not trade it for restraint.

In the commands below <skill> is this skill's folder. Run them from the project's root, so the working files land in .taste-skill/ there. The scripts need Node 22+ and an installed Chrome, Edge or Chromium, and install nothing. assets.mjs also needs network access; it uses no API keys.

The run

Do these in order. Steps 1–5 take a few minutes and decide whether the page is any good.

1. Read the brief and the project

Find out what is real: the subject, the audience, the one thing the page must get someone to do, the stack, any existing brand (colours, fonts, logo), and above all what imagery truly exists: the project's own photographs or product shots, a real interface that can be shown, an image generation tool you can call, or nothing. Do not plan around pictures you do not have. Nothing of its own is rarely nothing at all: the subject's city, street, materials and history are in open archives and museums, free to use with a credit (step 6, scripts/assets.mjs).

If the request is vague, decide and state your reading in one line instead of asking. Ask only when a missing fact blocks the work (for example, no product name).

Then inventory the subject in your notes: eight to twelve things that belong to this client and to no competitor. Look for its name and what the name means; its address, door number, street and neighbourhood, and what that place looks like (its tiles, signs, paint colours, typefaces on its shop fronts, its light, its weather); the numbers in the brief (seats, rooms, minutes to the sea, the price, the year); the constraint it lives with (only one batch a month, closed in winter, by appointment); its materials and colours; its rituals and hours (the oven lit at five, the ferry at seven); the printed things of its world (a timetable, a label, a ticket, a sign). This list is where the idea comes from in step 4. In blind tests, the page that won each brief was built from an item on such a list (the client's name and what it means, the street it stands in, the one constraint that makes it what it is), and the pages that lost had a good composition with a category idea. The list is also your picture search: each place, material and printed thing on it is a query for step 6.

2. Write the argument

Before any design, list the page as claims with their proof, one line per section, the way references/copy.md §1 shows. The claims decide which sections exist and in what order. Delete any section that has no claim. This is how you avoid the stock sequence of hero, logos, three features, testimonial, pricing, call to action.

3. Draw the direction

node <skill>/scripts/draw.mjs --sector <sector> --brief "<one line about the subject>" \
  --sections <roles in the order of your argument> [--tone <tone>] [--have <assets>] [--keep palette,type] \
  --options 3

This deals three directions and prints a short summary of each. Hold each one against your inventory: which way of composing can carry something only this client has? Choose that one, not the most familiar, and write one line in your notes on why. In testing, a single random direction that did not suit the subject was the commonest cause of a weak page. Then deal the full sheet:

node <skill>/scripts/draw.mjs <the same arguments, without --options> --direction <chosen id>

• --sector: node <skill>/scripts/draw.mjs --list sectors. Pick the closest.
• --sections: roles from --list roles (features, showcase, how-it-works, testimonial, proof, stats, pricing, faq, cta, footer, intro, about, work, gallery, list, contact). The hero is implied.
• --tone (optional): quiet, bold, warm, technical, playful, luxury, editorial. Only pass it when the brief clearly asks for one.
• --have: assets that really exist, comma-separated: photography (the project's own photographs of the place, people or work), product-photo (photographs of the specific product, or an image tool that can make them), product-ui (real screenshots), illustration, video. Leave it out if you have none: the draw then avoids compositions that depend on them and the sheet says how to fill picture slots honestly (software shows its own interface built in HTML; a product with no photographs is drawn and set among real pictures of its world, never a fake product shot). Pictures you will find in the open collections are not the project's own; leave them out of --have.
• --keep palette,type: when the brand already fixes colours or typefaces. The draw then deals only the composition, and you map the brand's values onto the roles.

The command prints a direction sheet. It is the art direction for this build:

• Adopt it. Do not blend it with the layout you would have made anyway. If it feels unfamiliar, good: the familiar layout is the one this skill exists to prevent.
• Redraw one slot (--redraw hero | type | palette | photos | section:<role> | direction) only for a reason you can state: it contradicts a stated brand constraint, or needs an asset that does not exist. Never redraw to get something more comfortable. Record every redraw in your report.
• When a dealt section cannot hold the real content (it compares three plans and there is one price; it wants five quotations and there are none), do not bend the content to fit. List the others with --alternatives <role>, pick the one whose assumptions match the content, and take it with --redraw section:<role>=<id>.
• Check the palette against the subject. A dealt palette is a set of proportions (one ground, one ink, one accent, fields) as much as a set of colours. If its colours fight the subject's own material (candy pastels for a peat whisky, neon for a mountain hut), redraw the palette once; if the subject has unmistakable colours of its own (its material, the paint of its street, the landscape outside its windows), keep the dealt proportions and take the colours from the subject instead, and say so in the report.
• Reprint it any time with node <skill>/scripts/draw.mjs --show. In a long session, re-read it before each section you build.

4. Find the idea

The direction is a way of composing. The idea is what makes the page belong to this subject and no other. Write this sentence in your notes and do not start building until both blanks are filled from the subject itself:

On this page, [something that belongs to the subject] becomes [the device the direction calls for].

Places to look for the first blank:

• Its output. What does the thing produce? Put the real output on the page as material. (A camera that prints poems delivered its copy as paper slips.)
• Its object or shape. What does it physically look like, in cross-section, in silhouette? Enlarge it, crop it, make it the frame or the one motif.
• Its name. Can the letters hold a photograph, stack into a wall, split to two corners?
• Its place. Is there one view that makes someone want to be there?
• Its ritual. Is there a sequence the page can perform as it scrolls?
• Its artefact. What printed thing already exists in its world: ticket, menu, label, receipt, invitation, folder, manual?
• Its opposite. Which other category owns the feeling this one lacks?

Fill the first blank from your inventory (step 1), not from the category. The competitor test: put the nearest real competitor in the sentence (the bakery two streets away, another oak furniture maker, another hut on the same mountain). If the sentence still works, the idea belongs to the category: a loaf of bread is every bakery; the seven doors of the street this one is named after are only this one. "Clean and modern" is not an idea. The sites the study's panel scored lowest were the ones whose idea was recorded as "none beyond the standard formula".

One live thing. Give the page one thing the visitor can do, or that is different for each visit, made from the idea: pick a wood and see the chair in it; type your name and see it cut in the foundry's letters; set the loan and read the real monthly figure; see whether the hut's stove is lit right now and how long until the last ferry; choose a size and see it against the room. In blind tests every winning page had one and the jurors named it first. Rules: it uses the subject's real content, it works on a phone with a thumb, it has a plain fallback without script, it never blocks reading, and it is one thing, not a playground. It is built in step 6 as part of the page, not added as motion in step 9.

5. Write the words

Write the whole page as a copy deck (plain text) before markup, following references/copy.md:

• Every headline fits in two lines or fewer at every width. Do the arithmetic in copy.md §2 before committing to a sentence: about 32 characters is safe everywhere at a confident size. The studied gallery heroes have a median of 5 words and 32 characters.
• One supporting sentence. One primary action, named for what it does, as a real button on the first screen.
• The first screen answers the visitor's first question in large type. For an event: what it is, when and where (the dates belong in the headline or at the second size, never only in small text). For a product: what it is and what it costs or does. For a person: who and what they do. Every section the visitor came for (the line-up, the menu, the rooms, the price) has its own heading and its own place in the navigation.
• Write the full content. Every section the brief asks for delivers its information completely: the whole menu with prices, each room with its own details, every speaker and talk, the price with what it includes, an answer for each real question. Thin sections are the commonest reason a clean page loses to a busier one.
• Sample details are expected where the brief leaves gaps (dish names, room names and rates, project titles) so the design is seen at full density; list them in the report for the client to confirm. Proof is never invented: no customers, quotes, reviews, press, logos or business statistics.

6. Build it, still

Build the page with motion switched off in your head; a page that needs animation to look finished is not finished. Order of work:

1. Tokens. Colour and type roles from the sheet as CSS custom properties. Everything downstream references tokens only. <skill>/assets/base.css is a neutral foundation you may start from (reset, token names, fluid type steps, grid, focus and selection styles, the motion helpers); it has no look of its own.

2. The hero, exactly as the blueprint describes it, at desktop and at phone width. Get the big thing big and the small things small before anything else exists.

3. Each section from its blueprint, with this project's content. Keep the geometry, change the subject. Neighbouring sections must not share a layout. Carry the idea into every section, pricing, FAQ and footer included: the commonest failure in the study, even among good sites, is a distinctive first screen followed by stock blocks.

4. Imagery, in this order of preference:

   1. the project's own;
   2. generated, if you have an image tool;
   3. real pictures of the subject's world from the open collections, whenever an honest one exists. Search them with node <skill>/scripts/assets.mjs "<query>" (Openverse, Wikimedia Commons, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Met; only licences that allow commercial use, by default). Search the inventory, not the category: its street in old postcards, an old map of the neighbourhood, its material up close, its trade in engravings, a museum object of its kind, a botanical plate, a star chart. Use them large and with intent: one archival photograph as the hero, an engraving enlarged into the page's motif, the real map of the street as the contact section. Look at each before choosing; --get <ref> downloads it into assets/ and records its source and licence, and --credits prints the credit line for the footer. A found picture shows the world around the client and is never presented as the client's own product, room, dish, person or team;
   4. drawn in code from the subject itself, for what no honest picture exists of (its objects, its tiles, its windows, its product's interface, made as one consistent flat graphic language in the palette's real colours);
   5. the photographs dealt on the sheet, only where an honestly generic picture fits (the sea for a sea house), never as a stand-in for the subject;
   6. type and colour alone.

   The floor, which the inspector checks: at least four real pictures on the page, usually six to twelve (photographs, archival images, maps, engravings, footage, raster artwork; for software, its cropped interface fragments count too). SVG drawings do not count toward the floor: draw what no picture exists of, and still carry real pictures. Add one moving picture wherever an honest clip exists: search it with assets.mjs --video "<query>" and use it as a muted loop with a poster frame. Models skip pictures and footage because finding them is work; the page fails without them.

   references/imagery.md covers searching, licences and credits, video, drawing, crops and treatments.

5. The live thing from step 4, built into the section where it proves the claim (often the hero or the booking), with real content, a thumb-sized phone version and a plain fallback.

6. Fullness. Look at each desktop screen as a poster: one dominant thing and the content it carries. A screen that is mostly empty ground is an underbuilt section, not a rest; one deliberate rest per page is the limit, and the inspector fails a page with two or more near-empty screens. Running text is in the full ink at 16px or more; grey is for secondary notes.

7. States and semantics. Real links and buttons, visible focus, alt text, a phone layout that is its own composition.

Read references/type.md, references/colour.md and references/layout.md when you need the detail behind a decision; the laws below are the short form.

7. Gate

node <skill>/scripts/lint.mjs <source files or folder>
node <skill>/scripts/inspect.mjs <url or path/to/index.html>

lint.mjs scans source for banned patterns and stock phrases. inspect.mjs opens the page in a real browser at 1440, 768 and 390 pixels, measures it (headline line counts, type sizes, fonts actually loaded, colours, rules, shadows, gradients, contrast, overflow) and saves screenshots to .taste-skill/inspect/. Fix every FAIL. Treat each WARN as wrong unless you can defend it to a designer in one sentence. Re-run until there are no FAILs. Do not argue with the meter and do not hide things from it. The inspector serves local files over a throwaway local server; if the page must also open straight from the file system, open index.html that way once before you finish.

8. Look

Passing the gate means nothing banned was measured. It does not mean the page is good. Open the screenshots the inspector lists (every viewport, with your image viewer or Read tool) and critique them with references/critique.md: the fourteen passes, the Awwwards-weighted score, the caps. Write the critique down in its format, fix the top three problems, run the inspector again, look again. Three rounds at most.

Judge only the pictures. If a problem is visible in a screenshot, it is real, whatever the code says.

9. Move

Now build the motion layer. It is required, and it is more than one fade: the inspector counts the elements that really move while the page loads and is scrolled, and fails a page under eight (it warns under sixteen). The layer has four parts:

1. The signature move named on the sheet: one, done well.
2. An entrance for the parts of every section: the heading, then the text, then the picture, staggered by 60–90ms, rising 16–32px with opacity, triggered once as the section enters. Not one fade for the whole block, and never content that stays hidden if the script fails.
3. Feedback on every control: press, hover and focus on buttons, links, cards and the live thing.
4. One moving picture: a found clip as a muted loop, a slow scale or drift on a photograph, or a scroll-linked move on the hero picture.

Transform and opacity only; every move has a prefers-reduced-motion fallback that keeps the content and drops the travel. A move that changes the colour or the layout of whole screens (colour by chapter, a pinned story) is part of the composition, so build it in step 6 and let every look round see it. references/motion.md has the tokens and tested recipes. Then run the inspector once more and check every screenshot for content that failed to appear.

10. Report

Tell the user, briefly: the direction dealt (name and seed) and any redraws with reasons; the idea sentence and the live thing; the final scores from your last critique round and what still falls short; every found picture and clip with its title, creator, licence and source page (assets.mjs --credits prints the list) and where its credit sits on the page; which bundled photographs and which drawings stand in for photography (so they can be replaced); and any sample content that must be swapped before launch. Do not claim a check you did not run.

House rules

These hold on every build, whatever the direction. inspect.mjs measures them.

Rule	Instead
Headlines: two lines or fewer, at every width. Every h1–h6, and the main line of the first screen whatever its tag.	Cut words. Then widen the measure. Size last.
Statements are paragraphs. An intro sentence or a quotation set large is marked up as <p> or <blockquote>, stays at statement size (36px or less on desktop, 24px on a phone) and runs to about 25 words, three lines.	Larger than that it is a headline and the two-line rule applies. In blind tests jurors read a 42px sentence over four lines as a four-line headline.
No eyebrows. No small label above a heading, no pill badge above the headline, no "New ·" chip.	Put the information in the heading or the first sentence, or drop it.
No monospace outside real code blocks.	The text face. Tabular figures where numbers align.
No index numbering. No 01 / 02 / 03, no (001), no "Step 2".	Order shown by position, size, or the words. A real <ol> if order matters.
No thin rules. No hairline dividers, no 1px outlined boxes, no grid lines, crosshairs or crop marks.	Space. A step in background tone. A change of scale. A filled shape.
No gradients. Not as backgrounds, not on buttons, not in text.	Flat colour, or a real photograph. A neutral scrim under text on a photo is the one exception.
No shadows on things at rest. No glows.	A tone step between surfaces. Shadows only on what truly floats: a menu, a dialog.
No assistant palette. No yellow-cream ground with terracotta or rust; no violet or indigo.	The dealt palette.
No tiny uppercase letter-spaced labels.	Sentence case at a readable size.
No icon-topped feature cards, no rows of identical cards.	The dealt section blueprint.
No glass. No backdrop blur panels, no floating pill navigation.	A plain bar: wordmark, a few links, one action.
No emoji, no gradient blobs, no decorative shapes, no fake dashboards of grey bars.	A real picture, a real interface fragment, or nothing.
No styled accent word in a headline (italic, serif, coloured, underlined).	One face, one colour. The words carry the emphasis.
Two typefaces at most, usually one.	The dealt type system.

Three places keep their own conventions and are left alone by the inspector: real code in <pre>/<code> (monospace is correct there), real tables and form fields (they may have lines), and a real interface fragment whose root carries the attribute data-ui (the product's own borders and menus; see references/imagery.md §7).

Why these, honestly. Some are what the study measured: among the 247 sites, those the panel scored 7.5 or higher used icon feature cards 1% of the time against 28% for sites under 6.5, pill badges 14% against 34%, gradients 22% against 52%, shadows 24% against 48%, tiny tracked caps 16% against 57%. Others are the owner's taste and go against current gallery fashion: monospace labels, index numbers and hairline grids are actually more common on award sites than on weak ones, which is exactly why generators imitate them and why they now read as costume. They are banned here without exception. references/tells.md keeps the dated registry.

Removing ornament leaves space. Never fill it with another ornament. Fill it with scale (make the main thing larger), with the full content, with a picture made for this subject, or with a field of flat colour. Leave it empty on purpose once per page at most.

Laws of the craft

Short form. Numbers are from the study unless marked as house style.

Type

• Two or three sizes do the visible work: one very large, one small, nothing in between. Median headline-to-body ratio on the studied sites is 4.3; the best go far beyond (largest type: median 8.4vw on the top sites against 5.0vw on the weak ones).
• Display type: tracking -0.02 to -0.05em, leading 0.85–1.05. Text: 16–20px, leading 1.45–1.6, 45–75 characters per line.
• Five sizes on a page is the ceiling. One family is normal (a third of the studied sites); two is the limit.
• Left-aligned by default. Centre at most one moment.

Space

• One grid, one pair of tight margins (16–32px), used everywhere; large things run to the edges. Text blocks share two or three left edges on the whole page.
• The gap between sections is clearly larger than any gap inside one: 120–220px on desktop.
• Each section has a different composition from its neighbours; none is a card grid.

Colour

• One ground, one ink, one accent. The accent appears on the action and perhaps one other thing.
• Running text in the full ink. A page set in soft grey reads unfinished.
• Surfaces are separated by a small step in tone, never by a line or a shadow.
• A section may change the whole field colour. Nothing fades into anything.

Imagery

• One dominant image beats six small ones. On the top-scored sites the hero media covers at least half the first screen 68% of the time.
• Same crop ratios, same treatment, square corners unless the direction says otherwise (73% of the studied sites leave media square).
• No image is better than a placeholder, an icon, or an abstract shape. A picture drawn for this subject, in its colours and with care, is better than either. A real picture of its world, found and credited, is better still.
• Every found picture is downloaded into the project, credited on the page and listed in the report. None is presented as the client's own.
• Nothing ever lies on top of a headline or a statement (the inspector fails it).

Components

• Buttons: flat, one fill colour, either square-cornered or fully round, decided once (top sites: 52% square, 23% pill; the 9–16px "soft" radius is the weak-site default). Most strong heroes have no button at all, or one.
• Navigation: wordmark, three to five plain links, one action. No bar chrome.
• The footer is a designed close, not a sitemap: on most strong sites the name returns at full width.

Special cases

An existing brand or design system. Pass --keep palette,type, map the brand's colours and faces onto the roles, and take only composition from the draw. The house rules still apply; if the brand itself requires a banned device (its logo sits in a gradient, its accent is violet), keep the brand asset, say so in the report, and pass --allow <rule> to the inspector for that rule only.

Redesign or review of an existing page. Run lint.mjs and inspect.mjs on it first and report what they find, then critique the screenshots with references/critique.md. For a redesign, draw a direction and proceed from step 2, keeping the page's real content and working behaviour.

A component or a single section, not a page. Skip the draw unless there is no direction to follow. Match the surrounding design, apply the house rules and the laws, and still inspect the result.

No checkout, no form backend. The primary button goes to the real destination when the brief names one. Otherwise it opens an email with a written subject and body (mailto: with the visitor's choices filled in), or, for a shop, it points at #checkout and the report says it must be wired before launch. Never fake a payment form.

No Chrome or Node 22. Run lint.mjs (Node 18+), take screenshots with whatever browser tool you have, and critique those. Say in the report that the inspector could not run.

No network. If assets.mjs reaches no source, draw the pictures and say in the report that the open collections could not be searched.

Files

File	Read it when
references/copy.md	Writing the argument and the copy deck (steps 2 and 5). The two-line arithmetic.
references/type.md	Setting type: scales, tracking, measure, loading fonts, pairing.
references/colour.md	Applying the palette: roles, proportions, tone steps, dark pages, contrast.
references/layout.md	Grid, margins, rhythm, section variety, navigation, footer, the phone composition.
references/imagery.md	Choosing, finding, crediting, cropping and treating pictures; what to do with none.
references/motion.md	Step 9. Budget, tokens, recipes, reduced motion.
references/critique.md	Step 8. How to look, how to score, what to fix first.
references/tells.md	The dated registry of generated-page tells and what each is replaced by.
references/research.md	The study: method, numbers, what the best and worst sites do. Cite it, do not guess.
scripts/draw.mjs	Deals and reprints the direction; --photos, --site <id> for more references.
scripts/assets.mjs	Step 6: searches open collections for real pictures of the subject's world; --get downloads with the credit, --credits prints them.
scripts/lint.mjs · scripts/inspect.mjs	The gate.
assets/base.css · assets/base.js	An optional neutral foundation to build on.
library/	The data the draw reads: directions, heroes, sections, type systems, palettes, photographs, studied sites, motions. Do not read it whole; use the script.