Hallmark picks a macrostructure for the brief, dresses it in one of twenty themes, runs fifty-eight slop-test gates plus a pre-emit self-critique, and refuses the on-distribution defaults every LLM was trained into. Two pages by Hallmark for two different briefs feel like different sites, not colour-swaps of the same template.

Five verbs

Verb	What it does
(default)	Build new UI. Picks a macrostructure, applies the rule-set, runs the slop test before handing back.
`hallmark audit <target>`	Score existing code against the anti-patterns. Punch list, no edits.
`hallmark redesign <target>`	Throw out the structure, keep copy + IA + brand, rebuild with a different fingerprint.
`hallmark study <screenshot \| URL>`	Extract the DNA from a design you admire: macrostructure, type-pairing, colour anchor. Refuses pixel-clones and paid templates. Optionally emits a portable `design.md` for handoff to other AI tools.
`hallmark variants <brief>`	Three structurally distinct directions for one brief, rendered live. Flip through them in a picker over your own localhost, pick one, keep building.

Different briefs, different shapes

Each generated from a different brief. The skill picks the theme, structure, and craft to fit each one, not from a template.


Bubble _{Sourdough app · Hum}	Distil _{Extraction API · Cobalt}	Cold Snap _{Record label · Carnival}	Cinder _{AI tool · Lumen}

Ferns & Fathom _{Tea menu · Custom}	Hollowback Apiary _{Honey farm · Garden}	Off-Register _{Print fair · Riso}	Press Quaternary _{Type studio · Custom}

Tally _{SaaS · modern-minimal}	Wayfare _{Travel · atmospheric}	NAJM _{Fashion brand}	Hyperlane _{Dev infrastructure}

Each page is self-contained HTML + CSS, stamped with its macrostructure in the CSS comment. Browse the full set at usehallmark.com or under site/_tests/.

Custom

When a brief carries creative intent that no catalog theme fits, Hallmark switches to Custom and designs the page from scratch: a made-to-measure palette, type, and layout. Same 58 slop-test gates, no template underneath.

In v1.2 the custom route runs a full art-direction ritual: it names and rejects the category's reflex aesthetics, writes a slate of seven grounded directions, and a deterministic draw (scripts/seed.mjs) picks which one gets built, sometimes dealing wildcards from a design-history atlas. A scene sentence sets the light, a colour posture (Restrained · Committed · Full palette · Drenched) sets how far the palette commits, and a five-block direction contract written into the artifact gets audited promise by promise before shipping.


The Cascadia Nightjar _{Sleeper-train ticket · Custom}	The Mend Assembly _{Repair-café broadsheet · Custom}

It stays a quiet branch; vanilla briefs never see it. The protocol lives in custom-theme.md.

Variants ^NEW

hallmark variants <brief> runs the ceremony once, then builds three complete directions: different macrostructure, different theme (one dark, one mid, one light paper, forced), different nav, different footer. A tiny zero-dependency picker server (skills/hallmark/scripts/variants/) shows all three as live frames; in an existing app each direction is a temporary route your own dev server renders, with a small chip in the corner to flip and pick. Choose one and Hallmark promotes it, archives the others under .hallmark/variants/, and logs the whole run. Say riff for a fourth direction. No Node available? The picker degrades to a static compare page, and a chat reply ("pick 2") always works.

Open models ^NEW

Hallmark v1.2 is written to hold up on open-weight models, not just Claude. The mechanically checkable gates now live in a zero-dependency checker the model runs instead of eyeballing:

node skills/hallmark/scripts/sloplint.mjs <file-or-dir> --genre <genre>

The skill carries a Critical floor that survives truncated reads, text-only fallbacks for every visual check (GLM has no vision; the skill knows), and a per-model quirks file (references/models.md) that loads only off-Claude.

Run it inside Claude Code on an open model via an Anthropic-compatible endpoint:

# GLM (Z.ai)                                  # Kimi (Moonshot)
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.z.ai/api/anthropic
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=<zai key>         # ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.moonshot.ai/anthropic
export ANTHROPIC_MODEL="glm-5.2[1m]"          # ANTHROPIC_MODEL=kimi-k3

The [1m] suffix on GLM is load-bearing; dropping it silently shrinks the context. Kimi Code CLI users: it discovers skills in ~/.claude/skills/ only, so install Hallmark there rather than as a plugin.

Install

npx skills add nutlope/hallmark

Re-run any time to update. Or copy SKILL.md + references/ into:

Claude Code: ~/.claude/skills/hallmark/
Cursor: .cursor/rules/hallmark.mdc (body of SKILL.md, no frontmatter; this channel ships no scripts, so variants picks by chat reply and the slop test runs fully model-judged)
Codex: ~/.codex/skills/hallmark/ (personal) or .codex/skills/hallmark/ (project-scoped)

The rule-set lives in SKILL.md and references/. Worked examples in docs/recipes.md and docs/study-examples.md.

Licence

MIT. Use it, fork it, ship it.

README.md

Hallmark