Craft — 11 rendering principles.
Quality rules for accessibility, motion, color, type, and state coverage.
- 01Accessibility baselineUniversal rules for the legal floor of accessibility plus the craft commitments that go beyond it. The active DESIGN.md decides brand appearance; this file decides which rules an artifact has to clear before it ships.
- 02Animation disciplineUniversal rules for when motion earns its place in a UI and what numbers constrain it. The active DESIGN.md decides brand-specific motion personality; this file decides whether motion should run at all and at what duration, easing, and accessibility floor.
- 03Anti-AI-slop rulesConcrete, checkable rules that distinguish "designed by a human who has shipped product" from "default LLM output." Several rules below are auto-enforced by the daemon's lint-artifact linter — failing an enforced rule is not a style preference, it is a regression. The rest are guidance for agents and reviewers and are flagged inline as "(guidance, not auto-checked)" so the contract with the linter stays honest.
- 04ColorUniversal color rules applied on top of the active DESIGN.md. The design system supplies the palette tokens; this file enforces how to use them.
- 05Editorial typography hierarchyExtends typography.md + typography-hierarchy.md. Defines hierarchy behavior for editorial surfaces: long-form articles, magazine layouts, digital guides, editorial landing pages, and blog posts.
- 06Form validationUniversal rules for form validation lifecycle, error wiring beyond the accessibility baseline, and the schema-as-contract layer that makes the same validation work on the server and the client. The active DESIGN.md decides how the field looks; this file decides when the field tells the user it's wrong, how the error reaches assistive tech, and where the rule lives.
- 07Laws of UXUniversal cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral heuristics that decide what a UI composes — how many pricing tiers fit on a screen, where a primary action anchors in scanning order, when a progress indicator earns its place, why a settings list needs grouping. The active DESIGN.md decides brand visual language; the existing craft files decide rendering rules (color, typography, motion, states, ARIA, RTL, forms); this file decides composition rules grounded in named research.
- 08RTL and bidirectionalUniversal rules for right-to-left layout and bidirectional text. The active DESIGN.md decides brand visual language; this file decides how that language behaves when the script reads from the right or mixes direction within a line.
- 09State coverageUniversal rules for what every interactive surface must render. The active DESIGN.md decides how each state looks; this file decides which states must exist and what they must contain. The single most reliable AI-design failure is shipping only the populated state.
- 10TypographyUniversal typography rules that apply on top of any DESIGN.md. The active design system decides which fonts; this file decides how they behave at every size.
- 11Typography hierarchyShared hierarchy contracts that layer on top of typography.md. This file does not repeat scale ranges or tracking values — those live in typography.md. This file defines how hierarchy behaves: entry points, rhythm, tension, and the conditions under which controlled violations are allowed. This contract applies per-surface (a page with multiple pacing resets may establish new primaries at intentional intervals), not globally.