ih-designer

designer

Your portable UI/UX designer for Claude Code — a plugin marketplace you add to any repo to get a designer's foundational craft plus a curated set of best-in-class design skills.

The whole thing is built around one objective:

Honor each project's own vibe, energy, feeling, and goals — don't make everything look the same.

It reads what a project already is, respects its existing design system, and only reaches for house defaults when there's nothing of the project's own to honor. Difference is the deliverable.

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What's inside

This repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. It ships one plugin authored here and references three excellent third-party skill sets, so installing this one marketplace gives you the whole designer.

Plugin	Source	What it gives you
ih-designer	this repo	The foundational designer: detect a project's design system, honor its vibe, build the project its own system when it has none, audit an existing one, apply UX principles, and work from a brand kit. No house style — every project gets its own.
impeccable	pbakaus/impeccable	Broad frontend design fluency — one skill with ~23 commands (polish, audit, critique, craft, …) and anti-pattern detection. Ships a Node-based PostToolUse hook that lints UI edits.
taste-skill	leonxlnx/taste-skill	Anti-slop taste for landing pages, portfolios, and redesigns (brutalist, minimalist, soft, redesign, brandkit, image-to-code, …).
emil-design-skills	emilkowalski/skills	Design-engineering taste from Vercel/Linear pedigree — motion, easing, animation review, and interface detail.

The ih-designer foundational skills

• honor-the-vibe — the prime directive and entry point. Reads the project, sets the precedence order (the project's own identity always wins), routes to the right skill, and refuses homogenization. Start here.
• detect-design-system — inspects a codebase for its existing tokens, theme, component library, type, color, space, and motion, and produces a structured Design Read with a maturity verdict.
• build-design-system — when a project has no system (or fragments), facilitates finding its aesthetic (asks questions, recommends directions) and builds its own tokens/type/color/space/conventions into the target repo.
• design-audit — when a system already exists, checks quality and consistency: consistent corner rounding, on-scale values, real hierarchy, no boxes-in-boxes.
• ux-principles — style-agnostic usability, accessibility, and interaction fundamentals (+ a full ux-principles.md checklist).
• brand-kit — capture, define, and apply a project's brand identity (+ a brand-kit-template.md).

designer has no baseline design system of its own. You point it at a project — say a repo called tide — and its job is to analyze tide, help shape tide's aesthetic, and integrate the result into tide's repository. Two projects designer touches should end up looking like themselves, not like each other.

How they work together

honor-the-vibe ─▶ detect-design-system ─▶ read the project's vibe, goals & maturity
      │                                              │
      │   branch on maturity:                        ▼
      │     Established ─▶ honor it + design-audit (tighten, don't restyle)
      │     Partial     ─▶ build-design-system (consolidate) + design-audit
      │     None        ─▶ build-design-system (create the project its own)
      │
      │   precedence when deciding (higher wins):
      │     1. project's own design system      ─▶ extend it invisibly
      │     2. project's brand kit / assets     ─▶ brand-kit
      │     3. a system built with the project  ─▶ build-design-system
      │     4. craft references                 ─▶ impeccable · taste-skill · emil
      │     5. universal UX principles          ─▶ ux-principles
      ▼
  commit & ship into the TARGET repo — real tokens, verified contrast, honest motion

There is no designer house style in that order. The fallback for a blank project is to build the project's own — never to stamp a default.

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Install

In any project where you use Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add weberswords/designer

Then install the whole designer, or pick pieces:

/plugin install ih-designer@designer
/plugin install impeccable@designer
/plugin install taste-skill@designer
/plugin install emil-design-skills@designer

Update the catalog later with:

/plugin marketplace update designer