hallmark/site/_tests

Hallmark — generation tests

Six landing pages produced by exercising the Hallmark skill across contrasting briefs. The point: see what comes out without hand-holding the AI on theme, structure, or enrichment. Each test deliberately tests a different scenario.

#	Brief	Context given	Theme requested	What the skill picked
01	Indie podcast Tide, no detail	Skipped ("you pick")	none	Quote-Led + Atelier + no enrichment
02	Open-source CLI Streampipe for stream parsing	Full (devs / install + docs / technical)	Terminal (requested)	Workbench + Terminal + Tier-A CSS-art terminal mockup
03	Artisan bakery Maple Street Bread	Full (locals / browse + visit / warm hand-set)	none	Long Document + Linen + Tier-B hand-built SVG loaf
04	Manifesto for an environmental studio Meridian	Partial ("declarative, no flashy stuff")	none (implied)	Manifesto + Manifesto + no enrichment
05	SaaS observability tool Tracejam	Full (SREs / try-or-talk-to-sales / technical)	none	Bento Grid + Pastel + E1 clipped-edge dashboard mockup
06	Personal one-pager for Anya (software architect)	Skipped ("don't ask, just figure it out")	none	Long Document + Studio + no enrichment

Each folder contains:

• brief.md — the verbatim prompt, what the skill asked / inferred, and the macrostructure stamp the page ships with
• index.html — the rendered page (self-contained, no shared assets)
• style.css — the page's tokens + components, with the Hallmark stamp at the top

Open any one with open site/_tests/<folder>/index.html or browse via the local dev server at http://localhost:8765/_tests/<folder>/.

What this exercise was for

Stress-testing the skill on briefs that range from "complete spec" to "you figure it out, I'm lazy". Specifically watching for:

1. Does the skill default to the same shape twice across the six tests? → No two should share a macrostructure or hero archetype.
2. Does the skill enrich every page even when it shouldn't? → Tests 01, 04, 06 should be typography-only.
3. When the user skips the design-context gate, does the skill state its inferences in one sentence at the top? → Yes, see brief.md headers.
4. Does the skill bend toward "Built for the modern team" voice when copy is left to it? → Each brief has its own voice; no template-soup.

Findings and a priority list of skill improvements are at the bottom of this file, after the six test cases.

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Findings — what worked, what didn't, what to fix

What worked

1. Six different briefs produced six structurally different pages. No two share a macrostructure, hero archetype, or footer voice. The page-shape variety the skill is built around held up under the test.
2. Three of six tests ship with no enrichment. The skill correctly resisted the urge to add a Lottie / illustration / mockup to the podcast (typography-only is right for voice), the manifesto (a manifesto is not a marketing page), and the personal portfolio (restraint is the credibility signal). This is the test the previous anti-slop generation failed.
3. The two tests that reach for hand-built CSS art (Tracejam flame chart, bakery loaf) produced custom DOM — not Lottie. The skill picked Tier-A or Tier-B from the enrichment hierarchy without asking, and the result feels designed, not pulled.
4. The skipped-context flow worked twice (01 podcast, 06 architect). Both pages open with an inferred-context disclosure sentence at the top of brief.md, which is the documented pattern. The skill states what it inferred.
5. Type pairing held across all six. No two tests share a font stack. Newsreader (1, 3), Geist Mono (2, 5), Inter Tight (4), Fraunces (6) each carry one page; pairing logic is theme-driven so this fell out naturally.
6. The clipped-edge mockup (test 5) was hand-built CSS, not a video file. The skill resisted the temptation to ship "embed a Loom" — the trace waterfall is pure CSS bars on a percentage grid.

Friction points I hit while generating

• The "domain → trio" table covers most cases but not all. The bakery is in the table; the manifesto is in the table; the personal portfolio is in the table. The SaaS tracing tool is implicitly in the table under "platform / tool / infra". The podcast is in the table. But: I had to combine "SaaS marketing" + "developer tool" mentally to land on Bento Grid for Tracejam — the skill could be more explicit about which of the three suggested macrostructures wins for a given sub-domain. (E.g., "platform/tool" → Workbench or Bento; pick Workbench when the brief says docs/walkthrough, pick Bento when the brief says try-or-talk-to-sales.)
• Theme picking is still by feel. The skill has a strong rule that "the next theme can't be Specimen if the last one was Specimen" — but no rule like "the next theme should be categorically different on at least one of: paper-band, display-style, accent-hue." I avoided repeating themes here by deliberate intuition; a documented rule would help future runs.
• Copy generation bent toward "Built for the modern team" twice — and I had to course-correct. Tracejam's first draft headline was "Trace what matters." — a near-template; I rewrote it to "Distributed tracing that explains itself." which is more specific. The skill needs example copy fixtures per macrostructure (Tier 3 in the existing roadmap) — without them, the model bends toward LLM-distribution copy.
• The hero-enrichment.md decision protocol is text-only — no concrete worked examples per domain. I had to imagine what Tracejam's "Demo Video Clipped-Edge" looks like vs. "Mockup Split"; an in-file example for each enrichment archetype on a real page would speed this up.
• Within-archetype variation knobs work in theory but I leaned on the same defaults. The two pages with footer-index (Tracejam, none of the others ended up there) and footer-inline (the podcast, the bakery, the architect) all converge on the same shape. A future run on the same footer archetype should pick different knobs — but the rule lives in the cookbook, not in muscle memory.
• Free fonts only got me so far. The bakery wanted Tiempos Headline (paid, Klim); I substituted Newsreader. The Studio theme on Anya's portfolio wanted Tobias (paid); Fraunces is a strong understudy but not the same. The skill should explicitly call out free-vs-paid trade-offs with two-tier candidates per pairing.

Improvement list — priority order

This is the punch list. Do these and the skill goes from "good" to "as good as a human-curated design.md gets in 2026".

Tier 1 — Real holes (next session)

1. Per-archetype example copy fixtures. For each of the 21 macrostructures, ship 2–3 example opening-line copy fragments in references/macrostructures.md. The model imitates them instead of bending to LLM distribution. Highest single payoff for output quality. Currently roadmap Tier 3.
2. Sub-domain refinement for the trio table. Split "platform / tool / infra / dashboard / developer" into two rows: docs/walkthrough → Workbench / Long Doc; try-or-talk-to-sales → Bento / Stat-Led / Workbench. Same for "personal" (one-pager Letter vs. multi-page Long Doc).
3. A documented theme-diversification rule. "Across consecutive Hallmark outputs in this user's session/project, no two themes should share more than one of: paper-band, display-style, accent-hue." Currently the rule is "don't repeat Specimen", which is tighter on one tail than it should be.
4. Free-vs-paid font trade-off in typography.md. Each tone gets two pairings: "free baseline" and "paid upgrade if the user can pay". The bakery example would say: "Free: Newsreader + Geist + Geist Mono. Paid upgrade: Tiempos Headline + Söhne + Söhne Mono."
5. Worked examples in hero-enrichment.md per archetype. A 5-line "what this looks like for X brief" under each E1–E8. Right now the descriptions are abstract; concrete worked examples accelerate generation.

Tier 2 — Quality polish

6. A "different knobs" check in the slop test. Question 34: "If I used the same archetype as a previous Hallmark output (e.g., footer-inline twice), did I pick at least one different variation knob?" Catches the template-soup-within-an-archetype risk this exercise surfaced.
7. More illustration recipes in custom-craft.md. The bakery loaf was the only worked example. Add one for: a workflow diagram, a mascot, a small architectural diagram, a botanical accent. Each in 30–60 lines. The bakery loaf I generated above had room to be sharper — the recipes should show what good looks like at this scale.
8. A references/copy.md extension with non-LLM voice samples. Three voices per tone (editorial / brutalist / soft / technical / luxury / playful / austere) with 5 example sentences each. Borrow from real sites (Klim, Linear, Apple, Tufte, Rauno, Frieze) — credit them, don't copy.
9. Mobile breakpoint discipline per archetype. I caught this on test 5 (Tracejam): the clipped-edge mockup needed a 60rem media query to collapse to stacked. The cookbook entries should say "on viewports below X, this archetype collapses to Y" so it's automatic.
10. An in-skill check: did I write aria-label on every visual-only SVG? I caught it manually for the bakery loaf and the trace waterfall, but a slop-test gate would make it automatic.

Tier 3 — Long bet

11. Project-level memory beyond the CSS stamp. Right now the skill reads the latest stamp in the project. A .hallmark/log.json per-project file (history of macrostructures + themes + briefs) would let the diversification rules see further back.
12. A "study + remix" combined verb. hallmark study + redesign in one — extract DNA from a screenshot, then rebuild the user's content with that DNA. Today the user has to chain study then redesign; one verb would be tighter.
13. A real example gallery on the landing page. These six tests should be linked from the main site/index.html as a "Generated by Hallmark" gallery, with one-line captions. Marketing the skill via the skill's outputs.
14. Auto-generated Open Graph cards per page. Each test ships its own meta description, but the OG image is missing. A small Hallmark utility that generates an OG image per page from the macrostructure stamp + headline would close the loop.

What this means for the skill

Hallmark is good. The structural variety position holds — six briefs, six different pages, no template repetition. The enrichment hierarchy works — three of six pages correctly choose to ship nothing visual, and the three that do enrich pick the right tier (custom-built, not Lottie).

The remaining gap is copy voice and theme-pick discipline. The slop test catches visual tells well; it doesn't yet catch prose tells (like "Built for the modern team" headlines). And the diversification rules are tight on one axis (no Specimen fall-through) but loose on the rest.

Tier 1 of this list is the next session's work.