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Taste Skill

by Leonxlnx · Leonxlnx/taste-skill

Encodes design taste — typography, spacing, color, composition rules — so Claude stops shipping generic-looking UI and produces work that reads as senior.

Taste Skill is a small, opinionated set of rules that pre-empts the most common AI design mistakes: too many fonts, body text at 14px on a marketing site, three competing accents, hero stack that looks like Bootstrap 4 in 2018. It runs as a review-and-rewrite step over generated UI, applying its rules and explaining why. Usable in any agent that supports skills.

Why use it

Key features

Live Demo

What it looks like in practice

ready

Install

Author repository · Claude Skills documentation

Use Cases

Real-world ways to use Taste Skill

Review a Claude-generated landing page through the taste filter

👤 Any dev shipping a marketing page Claude built ⏱ ~30 min intermediate

When to use: First-cut output looks fine but unmemorable.

Flow
  1. Critique
    Use taste-skill on /pages/landing.tsx. List every taste violation with severity and the rule it broke.✓ Copied
    → 10–20 violations, each tagged
  2. Fix tier-1
    Apply only severity-high fixes. Don't change copy — only visual/structural.✓ Copied
    → Diff applied; site no longer screams 'generic'
  3. Iterate
    Re-run critique on the result. Stop when only tier-3 nitpicks remain.✓ Copied
    → Converges in 2 passes

Outcome: A page that reads as crafted, not generated.

Pitfalls
  • Skill forces a style that fights brand — Pass --brand /design/brand.md so it respects guardrails
Combine with: filesystem

Audit a single component for taste issues

👤 Devs touching design system ⏱ ~15 min beginner

When to use: Before shipping a new component into the system.

Flow
  1. Critique
    Run taste-skill on /components/Card.tsx. Any taste issues at the component level?✓ Copied
    → Issues with quoted lines
  2. Variant check
    Compare hover, focus, and disabled states for visual coherence.✓ Copied
    → Drift detected if any

Outcome: Component ships with fewer 'why does that look weird' tickets.

Pitfalls
  • Critique ignores intentional design choices (e.g. brutalist style) — Pass --style brutalist or similar to relax some rules

Use taste-skill to set a baseline for a new design system

👤 Teams just starting a new product ⏱ ~60 min intermediate

When to use: You're choosing a token scale, font, palette and want a sane default.

Flow
  1. Generate baseline
    Generate a baseline taste-aligned token set — type, spacing, color — for a SaaS dashboard.✓ Copied
    → tokens.json with rationale per choice
  2. Stress test
    Generate sample pages (login, dashboard, settings) using the baseline. Critique your own output.✓ Copied
    → Pages + self-critique with possible refinements

Outcome: A defensible starting point you didn't have to negotiate with stakeholders.

Pitfalls
  • Generated baseline is too 'safe' — Provide brand inputs (mood, references) so output isn't bland
Combine with: design-extract-mcp

Combinations

Pair with other MCPs for X10 leverage

taste-skill-leon + design-extract-mcp

Pull tokens from a reference site, then run taste-skill to refine

Extract tokens from https://linear.app, then run taste critique on a page using them.✓ Copied
taste-skill-leon + filesystem

Persist critiques as design review records

Save each critique to /design/reviews/$(date +%F)-<page>.md.✓ Copied

Tools

What this MCP exposes

ToolInputsWhen to callCost
critique path_or_url, brand? Pre-ship review 0
fix path, severity_threshold After critique, target tier-1/2 0
baseline context: {product, audience} Cold-start a design system 0

Cost & Limits

What this costs to run

API quota
N/A
Tokens per call
Moderate — full-page critique is 5–10k tokens
Monetary
Free
Tip
Critique component-level is cheaper than full-page; iterate that way

Security

Permissions, secrets, blast radius

Minimum scopes: filesystem-read filesystem-write
Credential storage: None
Data egress: Local

Troubleshooting

Common errors and fixes

Critique returns no violations on obviously generic UI

Skill may be in 'lenient' mode — pass --strict

Fix breaks layout

Run with --diff-preview first, apply selectively

Conflicts with brand guidelines

Pass brand markdown via --brand so skill respects exceptions

Alternatives

Taste Skill vs others

AlternativeWhen to use it insteadTradeoff
stevembarclay/pencilplaybookYou want UI design taste rooted in Pencil's productSpecific to Pencil; taste-skill is general
Just a brand.md promptYou only ship one productWon't catch the AI-generic patterns this skill is shaped against

More

Resources

📖 Read the official README on GitHub

🐙 Browse open issues

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