use-design-md

use-design-md — consumer skill for the ko/design.md catalog

Mental model

The ko-design-md catalog (https://getdesign.kr) publishes one design.md per Korean service — a compact, machine-readable description of that brand's visual language: colors in OKLCH, typography, spacing, radius, signature components, and do's & don'ts. This skill is the consumer side: it pulls the right entry and uses it as the design brief for UI work in whatever project you are currently in.

It does three things, in order:

1. Discover — resolve the brand the user named to a catalog slug.
2. Fetch — download that entry's raw design.md (and, if useful, its token sidecar).
3. Apply — translate that design language into the current project's styling system.

This skill vs. design-md (don't mix them up)

• use-design-md (this skill) — CONSUME an existing entry. Runs in any repo. "Make my dashboard look like Toss", "apply Karrot's style to this screen".
• design-md (the other skill) — PRODUCE a new entry, adding a brand to the catalog. Only runs inside the ko-design-md repo.

If the user wants to add or edit a catalog entry, stop and point them at design-md. That is a different job in a different place.

Step 1 — Discover: resolve the brand to a slug

Fetch the catalog index (llms.txt format, ~one line per entry):

curl -s https://getdesign.kr/llms.txt

Each entry line looks like:

- [토스](https://getdesign.kr/services/toss/llms.txt): finance — <tagline>

Match the user's mention to a slug. The user may say a Korean name ("토스", "당근"), an English name ("Toss", "Karrot"), a design-system name ("SEED Design", "Vapor UI"), or the slug itself ("seed-design"). Match against the link text (name) AND the slug in the URL; the tagline often names the design system, which helps disambiguate.

Outcomes:

• One clear match → take its slug, go to Step 2.
• Several plausible matches → ask which one with AskUserQuestion.
• No match → the brand isn't in the catalog. Tell the user plainly, optionally list a few catalogued brands in the nearest category, and mention that adding it is a separate job (the design-md skill, inside the ko-design-md repo). Do not fabricate a design.md for an uncatalogued brand — that defeats the point of citing a real source.

See references/endpoints.md for the full endpoint map and fallbacks.

Step 2 — Fetch the design.md (and tokens if needed)

Fetch the raw entry:

curl -s https://getdesign.kr/services/<slug>/llms.txt

Use curl (Bash), not WebFetch, for the entry. WebFetch summarizes and transforms content through a model, which silently drops exact token values — an OKLCH triple, a 13px spacing step, a specific weight. The whole reason to pull from the catalog is fidelity to the brand's real numbers, so fetch the bytes verbatim. WebFetch is an acceptable last resort only when Bash/curl is genuinely unavailable.

If you need tokens as structured data (e.g. to generate a Tailwind theme or a CSS variable block programmatically), also fetch the sidecar from GitHub raw — there is no getdesign.kr endpoint for it yet:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CaesiumY/ko-design-md/main/services/<slug>.tokens.json

Read the design.md fully before applying anything. The prose carries intent — the do's & don'ts, the voice — that the token JSON alone doesn't capture.

Step 3 — Apply to the current project

This is the real work, and it's project-specific. Read references/apply-guide.md and follow it. In short:

1. Detect the target styling system first (Tailwind config, CSS custom properties, CSS-in-JS, plain CSS) before changing anything.
2. Map tokens onto that system rather than pasting raw values everywhere — change them at the source so the whole surface moves together.
3. Honor the Do's & Don'ts. They're the brand's guardrails, not decoration.
4. For a large or structural change, design it first before coding (in Claude Code: superpowers:brainstorming; in other agents, an equivalent brainstorming step); for a small restyle, just go.
5. Verify the result (preview/screenshot, or the project's tests) before claiming done — evidence before assertions (in Claude Code: superpowers:verification-before-completion).

Scope guardrails

• Don't gate on the current repo — this skill is meant to run anywhere.
• Don't invent values absent from the fetched design.md. If the user wants something the brand's tokens don't cover, say so and propose a reasonable extension marked as your inference, not the brand's spec.
• The catalog covers Korean services. A brand that isn't listed simply isn't available here — be honest about that instead of approximating from memory.
• Stay vendor-neutral: borrow the visual language, not the source design system's own name. Never surface the system's name (Vapor UI, SEED Design, …), its package names, or its class prefixes in the UI you generate — use the user's own product naming. See references/apply-guide.md §6.