Naming What You're Looking At

Someone describes a thing they can see but cannot name — "the bouncy bit when a popover opens", "the gap between two specific letters", "it fires on every keystroke". Return the exact term, its gloss, and the one term it is most often confused with. Then stop. This is a reverse dictionary, not a design opinion: it never rules on whether the thing should exist, how long it should take, or which curve it should use. The moment an answer needs a number, you have left this skill.

The sibling to stay clear of is design-critique. Both turn a vague feeling into words, but design-critique looks at one rendered screen and produces a falsifiable rule about that screen; naming looks at nothing, matches a description against a closed glossary, and returns a word that is true everywhere. "This dashboard feels cheap" is design-critique. "What's it called when it resists and snaps back at the edge" is naming — the answer is Rubber-banding, and the turn is over.

Read what the project already calls things before you answer. If the codebase ships a component named Popup, a token named --ease-drawer, or a hook named useSheet, give the canonical term and then say which local identifier it maps to — never open a rename. A glossary answer is for the conversation; the project's vocabulary is load-bearing in imports, tests, and design files, and correcting it is a refactor nobody asked for. The exception runs the other way: when the project has two names for one thing, say so, because that is a real defect the user can act on.

Quick Reference

Open design-terms-index.md first whenever the description does not obviously land in one category — it is a flat list of all 188 term names grouped by the 12 categories, cheap to scan, and it exists to stop you loading the full 12-category vocabulary blind. Open design-vocabulary.md as soon as you have a candidate term, because the index carries names only and the gloss is the answer. Open animation-vocabulary.md when the description contains a verb of movement or a feel word — "springy", "slides off", "draws itself in", "resists". Open engineering-vocabulary.md when the description is a symptom rather than a sight — "it fires too often", "the page jumps", "my z-index doesn't work".