Hallmark

A design skill for AI coding assistants. Makes the UIs they generate look made, not generated.

Powered by Together AI.

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What it is

A single, opinionated skill that gives Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex a firm rule-set for typography, colour, layout, motion, microinteractions, copy, responsive behaviour, and structural variety. It refuses to emit the on-distribution defaults every LLM was trained into.

The differentiator: Hallmark insists on structural variety, not just visual variety. Two pages from two briefs should not share the same hero → 3-feature → CTA → footer rhythm. They should feel like different sites.

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Five verbs

Verb	What it does
(default)	Build new UI. Asks for audience + use case + tone (skippable — the skill states what it inferred either way), picks a macrostructure, applies the rule-set, runs the slop test before handing back.
hallmark audit <target>	Score existing code against the named anti-patterns + structural sameness. Punch list, no edits.
hallmark refine <target>	Polish in place. Smallest possible diff. Preserves structure.
hallmark redesign <target> [--mood <name>]	Throw out the structure, keep copy + IA + brand, rebuild with a deliberately different fingerprint.
hallmark study <screenshot>	Extract the DNA from a design the user admires — macrostructure, archetypes, type-pairing role, colour anchor — and produce a diagnosis report. Optionally rebuild the user's content using the extracted DNA. Refuses paid templates and competitor pages. Names font roles, never font IDs. Never copies pixels.

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What's inside

• SKILL.md — the routing file. Design flow (six steps, including Step 2.5 · Check project memory reading .hallmark/log.json), slop test (35 questions), output contract.
• references/ — sixteen short, opinionated rule files: typography, colour, layout, motion, microinteractions, interaction-and-states, responsive, copy, anti-patterns, the 21 named macrostructures, the 36 component archetypes with variation knobs, the 6 primitive structure axes, the vision-extraction protocol for study, and three new files for hero work — hero-enrichment.md (when to add visuals to a hero, plus eight enrichment archetypes), custom-craft.md (how to hand-build CSS art, SVG, declarative animation, JS-driven motion, with Lottie demoted to last resort), and assets.md (sourcing canon for icons, brand logos, generated illustration via Nanobanana / Recraft, library illustration, app mockups, hero video, photography, abstract backgrounds).
• site/ — a self-demonstrating landing page. Hand-written HTML + CSS + ES module, no framework, no build step. Sixteen themes — Specimen, Newsprint, Atelier, Garden, Salon, Linen, Almanac, Midnight, Terminal, Brutal, Manifesto, Sport, Studio, Pastel, Riso, Quiet — that swap not just colour and typography but the page's hero archetype and footer archetype. Switching themes literally rebuilds the page. The "07 · Examples" section ships with eight generation tests (under site/_tests/) — each a self-contained HTML + CSS demo of the skill, with a real visual thumbnail on the gallery card.
• ROADMAP.md — Tier 1, 2, 3 work plus an explicit "things to not do" list.

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Install

npx skills add hallmark

Or copy skill/ into ~/.claude/skills/hallmark/ (Claude Code) or .cursor/rules/hallmark.mdc (Cursor — body of SKILL.md, no frontmatter).

To preview the landing page:

cd site && python3 -m http.server 4173    # → http://localhost:4173

Press T to cycle themes, R for random, ?theme=studio for a shareable link.

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What's distinct

• One skill, five verbs. Not eighteen commands.
• Tone is a first-class decision. "Clean and modern" is rejected. Pick an extreme.
• Macrostructures over axes. Pick one of 21 named whole-page shapes wholesale; the macrostructure stamp lives in the CSS comment, so the next Hallmark run picks something different.
• Within-archetype variation. Two Bento Grids should not be twins; each archetype has 2–3 picked-per-output knobs.
• Microinteractions as discipline. Silent success over celebratory toasts. Optimistic update + Undo over confirm dialogs. Hover delay 800 ms, focus delay 0 ms.
• A 38-gate slop test runs before every output. One yes fails the build. Three new gates added in v0.6.0: gate 36 (no horizontal scroll between 320 px and 1920 px — html { overflow-x: clip } is mandatory under any clipped-edge enrichment), gate 37 (decorative effects on text — highlighter bands, accent strokes, underlines — must be visually verified to sit in the right vertical zone, not at the baseline like a fat underline), gate 38 (interactive bars must declare align-items: center and line-height: 1 — inheriting line-height fights vertical rhythm).
• Project memory. A per-project .hallmark/log.json records each run's macrostructure + theme + enrichment + brief summary. The skill reads the last 3–5 entries before picking, and writes a new entry after each build, so consecutive Hallmark outputs in the same project don't repeat shapes or themes.
• Theme-diversification rule. Two consecutive themes must differ on at least one of three axes: paper band (dark / mid / light), display style (italic-serif / roman-serif / geometric-sans / mono / display-condensed-italic / display-heavy / system-native / risograph), accent hue (warm / cool / neutral / chromatic). Specimen-fall-through is no longer the only diversification check.
• Voice fixtures over LLM defaults. Each of the 21 macrostructures ships with 2–3 example opening lines from real designer-engineer sites (Pentagram, Klim, Linear, Are.na, Resend, Lynn Fisher, Rauno Freiberg, etc.). Each of seven tones in copy.md has three voice patterns × five sample sentences. "Built for the modern team" is in the banned-phrases list.
• Hero enrichment is opt-in, not a default. A typographic-only hero is always acceptable. When enrichment is right, the skill picks from a six-tier hierarchy: typography only → custom-built CSS art → hand-built SVG → generated illustration (Nanobanana / Recraft) → library + customise → Lottie (last resort).
• Microinteractions are default-on for SaaS-shaped archetypes. Bento Grid, Stat-Led, Workbench, Marquee Hero, and Conversational FAQ pages ship with 2–3 small purposeful microinteractions (number reveal on stats, pricing card lift, marquee scroll, recommended-tier pulse, stagger reveal on testimonials) without the user having to ask. Editorial / Manifesto / Letter / Quote-Led pages stay still — stillness is the brand on those.
• SaaS page sequence. When the macrostructure is a SaaS-typical archetype, ship hero → social proof / logo wall → features → testimonials → pricing → FAQ → CTA → footer by default. Real prices, not "contact sales for pricing" on every tier; specific testimonials with role and company, not abstract job titles.
• Wordmark may use a different display face. A Geist-bodied SaaS page can set its wordmark in Fraunces; a Crimson-Pro-bodied compliance page can use IBM Plex Mono. Same-family collapse on Bento / Stat-Led / Workbench / Marquee Hero archetypes is the new "un-branded" tell.
• study extracts DNA, not pixels. Vision-extraction with refusal heuristics, type-role vocabulary (no font ID guessing), and a confirmation step before any code.

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Credits

Built on the open work of:

• Paul Bakaus' impeccable — the named-tells canon
• tw93's kami — the slop-test concept and 20-question scoring
• Leonxlnx's taste-skill — taste vocabulary and the audit verb
• Anthropic's frontend-design and canvas-design skills — the design-context-gate pattern
• Google Stitch's DESIGN.md — single-source design docs
• Marie Claire Dean's 63 design skills for Claude — coverage map
• Steve Barclay's PencilPlaybook — the design-language playbook format
• The Slopless tactile-rebellion canon — the 2026 anti-AI-perfect movement (informed Studio, Pastel, Riso)
• Anthropic's Skill Engineering writeup — file budgets, load-on-demand patterns, frontmatter shape

Where rules overlapped, Hallmark adopted; where they diverged, Hallmark picked.

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Licence

MIT. Use it, fork it, ship it.