nuke-design
Nuke Design
Born from a real failure: a landing page that passed every planned gate — anti-default fonts, sanctioned palette with measured AA ratios, one motion concept, artifact-authenticity rules — and still rendered as slop: a mangled wordmark, half a viewport of dead black, a "signature element" that was a table with circles in it, an idle-screen product shot. The reviewer gave it 7/10 because the checklist passed; the owner called it garbage; the owner was right. The doctrine gap: gates judge intentions; design lives in the render. Every instruction that page had was intention-side (bans, tokens, artifact rules, floors); every instruction it lacked was render-side (composition, scale tension, material, craft passes, looking at your own output). Family slot in one sentence: nuke-creative picks the destination, nuke-design builds the road, and its tell-walk checks you arrived. This skill never picks a direction and never re-bans a default — brief, direction, anti-default gate, and a11y/perf floor arrive from nuke-creative (standalone: compress each to one line and move on). Research base in references/craft-rules.md, references/composition-and-materials.md, and references/slop-science.md — Refactoring UI, Butterick, the interface-craft school, Linear/Raycast/Vercel teardowns, the 2025-26 slop-science literature; rules below carry their numbers. Family map: references/family-map.md.
The prime rule — build against pixels
Screenshot cadence is mandatory DURING build, not only at the end: after the skeleton, after each major surface, before hand-back — desktop 1440 and mobile 390, minimum. The single documented mechanism that turns competent output into designed output is iteration against rendered screenshots with a separate scored evaluator; self-evaluation by the author "confidently praises mediocre work", and advisory review ("check your output") is ignorable where a scored floor is not. No render tooling available → every verdict is marked craft: static (degraded) — never silently substitute code review for looking.
Calibration: score what a stranger sees, not the effort you know went in. Before saying any number ≥7, name the three worst things in the render out loud; if any would make a designer wince, the 7 was loyalty. And know the model's bias: unguided output already passes on craft-hygiene and functionality — it fails on originality and composition, so that is where the judgment budget goes.