nexu-io__open-design/craft

Craft references

Brand-agnostic craft knowledge. Each file is a small, dense rulebook on one dimension of professional UI craft (typography, color, motion, …). Skills opt into the references they need; the daemon injects only the requested ones into the system prompt above the active skill body.

Why a fourth axis next to skills, templates, and design systems

Axis	Scope	Example
skills/	Functional capabilities invoked while doing work	design-brief, brand-extract, imagegen
design-templates/	Packaged artifact shapes	saas-landing, dashboard, pricing-page
design-systems/	Brand package: prose, token contract, and optional rich resources	linear-app, apple, notion
craft/	Universal craft knowledge — true regardless of brand	letter-spacing rules, accent-overuse caps, anti-AI-slop

DESIGN.md tells the agent which colors and fonts a brand uses. craft/ tells the agent the universal rules a competent designer applies on top — e.g. ALL CAPS always needs ≥0.06em tracking, regardless of the brand.

How a skill opts in

Add an od.craft.requires array to the skill's front-matter. Only the listed sections are injected, so a skill that needs only typography pays no token cost for color/motion content.

od:
  craft:
    requires: [typography, color, anti-ai-slop]

Use the layered stack for editorial skills that require authored hierarchy and sustained reading behavior:

od:
  craft:
    requires: [typography, typography-hierarchy, typography-hierarchy-editorial]

Allowed shipped values match the file names in this directory minus the .md extension. The runtime skips an absent file for compatibility, but repository authoring does not silently accept arbitrary values.

Run pnpm lint:craft after adding or changing od.craft.requires. The repository guard reports unresolved slugs with their manifest paths, so typos cannot silently drop a craft section from the runtime prompt. If a slug is an intentional forward reference, list it in craft/FUTURE_SECTIONS.md until the matching craft/<slug>.md file ships.

Runtime compatibility and authoring failures

The loader remains tolerant because externally installed or older bundles may reference a section that is unavailable in the current resource set. A missing optional paragraph must not make an otherwise usable runtime bundle fail.

Checked-in content has a stronger contract: pnpm lint:craft and pnpm guard fail on malformed slugs and unresolved references. A deliberate forward reference is valid only when it is listed in craft/FUTURE_SECTIONS.md; this makes planned work explicit while preserving the runtime compatibility behavior.

Note for skill authors arriving from older guidance: an earlier draft used motion as the future-slug placeholder. The shipped equivalent today is animation-discipline. Use that one if your skill emits motion.

Enforcement levels

Craft files mix auto-checked rules and guidance.

• Auto-checked. Rules wired into apps/daemon/src/lint-artifact.ts — currently the P0 list in anti-ai-slop.md (Tailwind-indigo accent, two-stop hero gradients, emoji-as-icons, etc.). The linter reports these as findings back to the UI (for P0/P1 badges) and to the agent (as a system reminder for self-correction). Artifact persistence is not currently hard-blocked on P0 hits.
• Guidance. The rest. The agent reads the rules, reviewers apply them, the linter doesn't check them.

A purely behavioral craft file (state-coverage, animation-discipline) is guidance unless a specific rule is later promoted into lint-artifact.ts.

Files

File	Section name	When to require
typography.md	typography	Any skill that emits typed content (~all skills)
typography-hierarchy.md	typography-hierarchy	Any skill that emits typed content where hierarchy must feel authored, not assembled — especially surfaces with a strong entry point, varied levels, or intentional rhythm. Compose with typography.
typography-hierarchy-editorial.md	typography-hierarchy-editorial	Skills whose primary artifact is a sustained reading surface: blog-post, docs-page, digital-eguide. Requires typography + typography-hierarchy.
color.md	color	Any skill that emits styled output (~all skills)
anti-ai-slop.md	anti-ai-slop	Marketing pages, landing pages, decks
state-coverage.md	state-coverage	Any skill with stateful UI (dashboards, mobile apps, forms, list/table views)
animation-discipline.md	animation-discipline	Any skill that ships motion: mobile apps, multi-screen flows, gamified UI, transitions, microinteractions
accessibility-baseline.md	accessibility-baseline	Any skill that ships interactive UI: dashboards, forms, mobile flows, anything with focus/labels/keyboard paths
rtl-and-bidi.md	rtl-and-bidi	Any skill that ships localized text or layout: blogs, docs, financial tables, mobile apps, anything that may render Arabic / Hebrew / Persian
form-validation.md	form-validation	Any skill whose primary artifact contains an interactive form: lead capture, sign-in, signup, settings, multi-step intake
laws-of-ux.md	laws-of-ux	Any skill whose composition decisions hit named cognitive limits: pricing pages (Hick's, Choice Overload, Von Restorff), dashboards (Pareto, Selective Attention, Working Memory), onboarding (Goal-Gradient, Zeigarnik, Peak-End), modals (Fitts's, Tesler's). Sibling axis to the rendering-rule files above — covers what to compose, not how to render.

Partial-stateful skills. A skill that's mostly static but contains an embedded form, data table, or query surface should opt in. State-coverage rules apply to the stateful component, not the whole page.

Planned-but-unshipped slugs are recorded in FUTURE_SECTIONS.md; do not hard-code a second future list here.

Attribution

Craft content is adapted from the MIT-licensed refero_skill project (© Refero Design), with edits to fit OpenDesign's house style and link back to OD's design tokens (var(--accent) etc.) instead of generic Tailwind hex values.