Impeccable Design Guardrails

Purpose

Every model trained on the same SaaS templates converges on the same tells: Inter for everything, purple-to-blue gradients, cards nested in cards, gray text on colored backgrounds, a rounded-square icon tile above every heading, bounce/elastic easing. This skill encodes the Impeccable anti-pattern checklist so those tells get caught during generation/review, without requiring the full CLI+hook toolchain to be installed in every project.

When to activate

Building or editing visual UI: landing pages, marketing sites, dashboards, new components, design-system tokens.
User asks for a design critique/polish/audit ("make this look better", "review the UX", "does this look AI-generated"), or explicitly names an Impeccable-style command (audit, critique, polish, distill, harden, bolder, quieter, colorize, typeset, layout, animate).
Does not activate for backend-only, CLI, or non-visual work.

Anti-patterns to catch (condensed from the 46 detector rules)

Typography: default/overused fonts (Arial, unconfigured system fonts, Inter used everywhere with no intent); skipped heading levels; line length too long/short for body text.
Color: purple-to-blue gradients as a default; gray text on colored backgrounds; pure black/white (#000/#fff) instead of tinted near-black/near-white; low-contrast text.
Layout/components: cards nested inside cards; a rounded-square icon tile above every section heading; cramped padding; inconsistent spacing scale; small touch targets (<44px) on interactive elements.
Motion: bounce/elastic easing (reads as dated); motion with no purpose.
Structure: side-tab borders as a lazy nav pattern; dark glow shadows used decoratively rather than for elevation.

Workflow

Context first. If the project has DESIGN.md or PRODUCT.md (from a real Impeccable install, or hand-written), read it for audience, brand lane, voice, color/type/component decisions — do not invent a design system from scratch when one already exists.
Shape before build for new UI: state the audience/lane (brand vs product surface), then propose layout/type/color before writing markup, mirroring /impeccable shape.
Build using the active stack skill (vanilla-web, next-stack, etc.) — this skill supplies the design lens, not the implementation mechanics.
Self-review against the checklist above before marking UI work done — this replaces /impeccable audit/critique/polish when the CLI isn't installed.
Harden: error/empty/loading states, text overflow, i18n-safe spacing, responsive behavior — mirrors /impeccable harden.

Install (opt-in, per project — do not run without asking)

Impeccable's own CLI adds a live browser-iteration mode, 46 deterministic (no-LLM) detector rules, and a Cursor-native hook that blocks bad writes before they land (.cursor/hooks.json → .cursor/skills/impeccable/scripts/hook-before-edit.mjs). Suggest this when a project does sustained frontend work and the user wants automated enforcement, not just review-time guidance:

npx impeccable install        # detects .cursor/.claude/.codex etc.; asks project vs global scope
/impeccable init               # inside the AI tool: writes PRODUCT.md / DESIGN.md

Requirements specific to Cursor: Nightly channel (Settings → Beta) and Agent Skills enabled (Settings → Rules) — Cursor's stable channel does not run Agent Skills yet. Confirm with the user before running npx impeccable install (network + writes .cursor/hooks.json, .cursor/skills/impeccable/); this is a per-project decision, not something to vendor into the global config repo.

Output contract

For review/critique: a findings list grouped by the anti-pattern categories above, each with file/selector and a concrete fix (not just "improve this").
For new UI: the design rationale (audience, lane, key decisions) alongside the code.
Do not claim a /impeccable <command> ran unless the CLI is actually installed in the project — otherwise say "checklist applied manually" instead.

impeccable-design