# New visual work

Use this flow when making a new surface or replacing a visual identity. PRODUCT.md owns product truth. DESIGN.md owns durable visual decisions. A surface brief keeps strategy that belongs only to one route or artifact. Complete [init.md](init.md) first when PRODUCT.md is missing; a missing DESIGN.md does not route back to init.

## 1. Decide what is already true

Read DESIGN.md, representative code, tokens, components, and assets.

- **Redesign:** preserve product truth, content, function, constraints, and explicit brand commitments; replace the old visual world rather than polishing it. The old look is evidence of what the subject is, not authority over what it becomes.
- **Established world:** inherit it. A missing DESIGN.md does not erase a coherent identity already present in code; document that identity instead of inventing a replacement.
- **Incomplete brand:** preserve confirmed assets and recognizable traits, then help the user expand the system for this new surface.
- **No visual authority:** create a new world with the user.

A section, component, feature, or state inside an established surface inherits that surface. Do not turn a local addition into a new identity exercise.

## 2. Ask what will change the work

Ask one round of two or three related questions through the structured question tool when available. Skip settled facts; a precise request may need only a compact confirmation.

- **Persuade:** clarify who must act, what they should believe, and which real proof, content, or assets can earn that belief.
- **Operate:** clarify the task, information, important states, frequency, and constraints.
- **Read:** clarify the reader's question, source material, structure, and wayfinding.
- **Experience:** clarify what leads, how exploration unfolds, and which interaction or transition matters.

Across modes, ask what success looks like, what must remain untouched, and what would make a polished result feel wrong. Do not ask for CSS values or canned aesthetic lanes.

## 3. Choose the right amount of invention

### Extend an existing surface

Inherit its world and composition. Resolve only the new purpose, content, hierarchy, states, interaction, and how the addition joins the surrounding experience. Do not run a concept tournament or change DESIGN.md unless the user approves a durable system change.

### Create a whole surface inside an established world

Keep the visual system fixed. Derive five to seven materially different structures from the content, task, and user behavior, ordered by resonance. For a genuinely open whole page, screen, or flow, run:

`node .claude/skills/impeccable/scripts/concept-seed.mjs --scope surface --mode <mode>`

The script assigns which structure gets built; your top-ranked structure is what every run would ship, so the dice come from outside. Never run the script for a local extension or a precisely specified narrow request; shape those directly.

### Create or replace the visual world

1. Name the product's unique mechanism in one sentence, the audience's real scene, its cultural home, and what this first surface must prove. Note the page this category always ships and its predictable opposite; name both as the rut and keep them out of the seven-candidate list. A brief that paints its own picture, a product name, a titled artifact, a governing metaphor, adds its literal reading to the rut: spend at most one candidate on it and derive the rest from elsewhere in the audience's world.
2. From that cultural world, list seven concrete visual systems, artifacts, places, or rituals the audience knows by heart, each with one line on why it resonates and can carry the mechanism, ordered by resonance. The audience's world includes its graphic and screen traditions, not only its physical objects: the notation, publications, identity programs, data graphics, and interfaces it reads daily; a nameable abstract system (a school of poster, a documentation standard) is as concrete a candidate as any artifact. What would this thing look like as a physical object; what did its world look like before the web? Near-duplicates count once. When more than three of the seven share one material family, the derivation stopped at the subject's most obvious artifact; dig until the list spans at least three families.
3. Turn that material into complete directions: each joins a reusable visual world to a concrete first-surface experience.
4. Run `node .claude/skills/impeccable/scripts/concept-seed.mjs --scope direction --mode <mode>` and follow what it prints. This step has no substitute and no skip condition: on a new or replacement world, writing artifact code before this script has run and its assignment is acknowledged is a contract violation, whatever the harness, the model, or the time pressure, because the roll is the mechanism that keeps every run from converging on the category default. The script assigns which direction gets built and deals catalog challengers. Fuse each challenger before judging it: the challenger supplies the form and its system grammar, the product supplies every fact, and clarity wins conflicts. Weigh fused challengers against the assigned direction on exactly two axes, audience identification and product clarity; losing to strong grounded material is a valid outcome, and beating a thin or tool-monoculture list is the point.
5. Present one direction, fully committed: its world, first viewport, visitor path, signature interaction, cross-surface reach, and honest risk. Alongside it, offer the hand's challengers as named alternates, the weighing's verdict written on each as its one-line case, an honest "fuses poorly because X" included; the weighing informs the user's choice, it never pre-empts it. A hand holds at most three challengers: when the roll deals more, the three strongest join the hand and the rest wait in the re-roll pool, noted in one line; dropping a challenger from the hand itself takes a named product-truth failure, disclosed. Add re-roll with an optional one-line steer. Never present a ranked menu of your own grounded candidates; a lineup of those invites the safest card. The two channels share this structure and differ only in richness: cards and boards on the decision page, names and one-liners through the structured tool; the structured tool's option list also carries the standing exit as its last option.

The standing exit: every direction round offers one quiet, permanent alternative, the category standard, played straight. It is the user's door, never yours: never recommend it, never weigh it against the roll, never let it soften the dealt directions; the counterweights bind the unchosen default, not the chosen one. When the user takes it, in the canon action, a safer-steer, or plain words asking for the familiar or competitor-like path, convention becomes the commitment: ask once for two or three products this should sit alongside, make their craft level the bar, and execute the canon at full fidelity, without irony or smuggled quirk. A standing preference gets recorded as a brand commitment in PRODUCT.md. Re-roll eliminates every direction already shown, grounded and challenger alike; after two consecutive re-rolls, ask what quality is missing. You may re-roll on your own only on named factual grounds, when the assigned direction cannot carry the product's truth or task; taste is never grounds. The user may re-roll freely, and a user- or brief-pinned direction beats the roll, always. Present the decision visually: write an options payload with the assigned direction leading, the dealt challengers as alternates carrying their QUALITY BAR cards, and re-roll, steer, plus canon enabled; a degraded roll with no challengers still uses the page, as a single text-only card with re-roll. Give every card the same anatomy, thesis, palette, materials, first viewport, honest risk, and the challengers' case lines (run the script with `--schema` for the exact shape); the page renders identity from these fields, and a challenger's catalog image rides as labeled inspiration, never as the promise of the build. Author `canonCard` too: the category standard as one honest card with the same anatomy; the page keeps it subordinate, and the counterweights still bind you. Run `node .claude/skills/impeccable/scripts/serve-question.mjs --start --payload <file>` (run it with `--schema` first for the exact payload shape). It daemonizes, prints the page URL and a key, and exits immediately; now open that URL for the user, in-app browser first, then the system opener, then showing the URL. Collect the choice with `--wait --key <key>`, repeating while it exits 3; the ANSWER prints as JSON. Exit 4 means the page was closed without an answer: re-present once through the structured question tool, and with no answer there either, proceed unattended with the assigned direction and state the assumptions. A harness that can leave a shell blocked in the background may instead run the script without `--start` and let it auto-open and block. Only a session where no browser can open at all, headless, CI, an eval worker, a remote shell with no display, puts the same decision through the structured question tool instead; the script self-detects these environments and exits 2 with that advice, so treat exit 2 as this fallback, never as an error to retry.

When image generation exists, every card also declares a `sketch` path under `.impeccable/sketches/`, the canon card included. Where the harness sandboxes its shell, start the page through the least-sandboxed command path it offers: a sandboxed shell cannot bind the board's port, and the first-attempt failure costs a retry every session. Serve the page first, then produce the sketches; the page shimmer-waits per slot and the user may answer before they land. Render every sketch through one shared frame so the comparison stays about direction, never rendering luck: the requested surface's first viewport as a flat, matte design sketch in that card's own palette and type character, deliberately unfinished, no photorealism, no gloss, identical framing across cards; a candidate whose sketch looks more finished than the others has broken the comparison, not won it. The frame's aspect is the surface's own: a native app or mobile-first surface sketches portrait at its device viewport, a desktop web surface landscape, and the decision page adapts to either, so a phone screen sketched landscape is a broken frame, not a neutral default. The only legible text in a sketch is the product's real name and one real headline; every other text region is greeked, indistinct lines standing where copy will go, because a sketch that renders invented specs, prices, or dates puts claims in front of the user that PRODUCT.md never made. Produce in the order the user reads: the assigned card, then the hand, then canon, each file written the moment it is done. When the harness runs subagents in parallel, fan the set out as one agent per card: each spawn is the shipped asset producer with a single-sketch packet, that card's fields, PRODUCT.md, the shared frame, and the card's declared path, up to four in flight at once. A slot still empty when its agent returns is regenerated inline, and a slot still empty when the user answers is dropped without ceremony; no other supervision is owed. Without parallel subagents, generate in the main thread after serving, in the same reading order, and let the harness's own generation display carry the progress; the wait for the answer follows the last file. A sketch answers which world, never which composition: the comp round still renders its full set, and the chosen card's sketch seeds at most one probe. With no image generation, the cards carry their identity in palette chips and facts, and that page is complete, not a lesser version.

Catalog worlds are working systems, not mood references. When one survives, carry its palette and material, type and composition, topology, controls and state, and responsive rules into the product. When the source is itself an interface language, commit to its native grammar across navigation, content, controls, and states. Open the QUALITY BAR board and hero for the world you build the moment the choice lands, even if you viewed another card earlier; the ANSWER line names the chosen card's images (when the harness only reads files or runs sandboxed, download them into the workspace and open the relative path; sandboxed viewers reject absolute paths outside it). They set the craft level the build must reach, a rendered reference's finish, commitment, and art direction, never the composition; your surface serves this product.

Every direction the roll can land on must already be viable: every relationship and claim it visualizes true, a real palette and component family, a distinctive composition with one product-specific experience, workable at full-surface scale within the available assets, tools, and performance budget. A candidate that fails on truth is replaced before the roll, never rescued by it. Truth binds claims, not demonstrations: in greenfield work, author whatever illustrative material the concept needs at full fidelity, label it synthetic wherever a visitor could mistake it for the real thing, and hand the user the list of what to replace with real material. What stays uninventable are commercial and factual claims: prices, customers, benchmarks, endpoints, capabilities the product does not have. Refusing a bold direction because its demonstration data does not exist yet is the timidity reflex wearing honesty's clothes.

For **Persuade**, the opening must make the offer intelligible and desirable, expose a clear action, and demonstrate something only this product can prove. Conversion lives inside the form's own vocabulary: a hook that lands in one line, a visible primary action, a legible reading order. A committed form that hides the offer or the action has not finished translating. For **Operate**, expression may never obscure the task, state, or familiar affordance. For **Read**, comprehension and wayfinding remain intact. For **Experience**, the work itself leads from the first viewport.

## 4. Commit the world

Pick a color strategy before picking colors: Restrained (neutrals plus one accent; the default when the visitor came to operate or read), Committed (one saturated color carries 30-60% of the surface), Full palette (3-4 named roles), or Drenched (the surface IS the color). Persuade and Experience surfaces have permission for the bolder strategies; take them when the brief allows. Color commits at page scale: fields that own whole regions, not accents scattered over a neutral ground. Dark or light is never a default: write one sentence of physical scene (who uses this, where, under what light) and let it force the answer.

Choose faces like objects from the subject's world, in the mode's register. Operate and Read surfaces are well served by system stacks and workhorse UI faces; Persuade and Experience surfaces want faces with a point of view, and these training-data defaults mean you stopped looking: Fraunces, Playfair Display, Cormorant, Lora, Crimson, Newsreader, Syne, Space Grotesk, Space Mono, IBM Plex, Inter-as-display, DM Sans, DM Serif, Outfit, Plus Jakarta Sans, Instrument Sans. Naming one of these faces anyway requires a reason no other face could satisfy, and a subject association is never that reason: books wanting a serif, bookshops wanting hand-lettering, and tech wanting a mono are the associations the list exists to break.

Calibration: AI-generated interfaces cluster around a few looks regardless of subject: warm cream ground, high-contrast serif display, and a terracotta or signal-red accent; near-black with one neon accent and glowing edges; broadsheet-editorial hairlines, italic display serif, and small tracked mono labels. All are legitimate when the brief calls for them. Where the brief leaves the aesthetic free, landing in one means the self-check failed: if someone could guess your aesthetic from the category alone, or from category-plus-avoidance, rework until neither answer is obvious. Energy is not the enemy of trust: a brief's negative constraints (no gamification, no hype) rule out those devices, not exuberance, and adjectives describing the product's behavior (quiet support, calm coaching) do not dictate the surface's energy. A bookish, warm, or child-facing subject does not soften the calibration: book cloth, thread, jackets, endpapers, and shelf ephemera span the whole saturated spectrum, and cream paper is the smallest corner of that world; landing on cream plus serif for a book subject is the default wearing the subject's clothes. A brief-pinned world pins the world, not its softest rendition: the pinned world's full material range stays in play, and a rendition that matches what any model ships for that world failed the self-check at execution rather than selection.

Your measured rendition prior: warm, bookish, family, and child-facing subjects come out as cream grounds, serif display with italic accents, and lamplight, even when the assigned direction never asked for them. Treat that first palette as already spent. Before writing code, reread your OWN-WORLD block: when it says cream, paper, parchment, ivory, or lamplight for a Persuade surface the brief did not pin, the rendition failed and you rework it from the world's saturated materials first. The same subject renders as bookcloth, thread, jacket, and endpaper color on other models; nothing about the subject requires your default.

## 5. Record the decision

Before code, state the chosen direction as a contract in the artifact's opening comment, five short blocks, 150 words at most, in a form that survives the production build: an HTML comment in the emitted markup, never only a templating-frontmatter comment, placed as the first child of the document's body in the root layout, never inside a slotted or child component (some compilers, Astro among them, strip a slot's leading comment while keeping deeper ones). After the first production build, grep the built output for the seed key; a contract the build erased is a contract nobody can audit. THESIS: the one idea this surface owns and the category-default arrangement it refuses. OWN-WORLD: the palette and component language, specific enough to be recognizable with all content removed. STORY: what the visitor understands, believes, and does. FIRST VIEWPORT: the exact composition, what is where and at what scale, and where the primary action sits. FORM: the chosen form, its position on your ordered list, and the seed key the script printed. Close the comment with one more line, FINISH: the run's exit condition, verbatim "unreviewed and undocumented is unfinished; this build ends with the finish review, the verdict, and DESIGN.md". The comment tops the artifact you re-open on every edit, the one reminder that survives a long build: a page that looks complete with the FINISH line undischarged is not done, it is abandoned at the finish line. If a block reads like a mood, the direction is not decided yet; the finishing review audits the render against this contract.

On a new or replacement world, DESIGN.md is written at finish, from the built world, by the shipped documenter (section 7); a rulebook written before the build gets defended against reality instead of describing it, and hands the design-system detector an unstable target. A new world shipped with no DESIGN.md is still an incomplete run. An ordinary extension does not rewrite DESIGN.md.

If the work establishes durable strategy for a route or artifact, read its existing surface brief, then update it:

`node .claude/skills/impeccable/scripts/surface-brief.mjs read <primary-target>`

`node .claude/skills/impeccable/scripts/surface-brief.mjs write <primary-target> <body-file> [related-target ...]`

Keep the brief small: scope and visitor mode; audience, job, action/task, proof/content, and constraints; chosen direction and memorable moment; unresolved decisions. Do not copy global product truth or DESIGN.md tokens into it.

Whenever any image generation is available, a harness-native tool or the API fallback context.mjs reports, the locked direction is visualized before it is built, never skipped: load [visualize.md](visualize.md) and follow it, three compositional options rendered and put before the user for approval. This step is proven to produce the most compositional and ambitious work.

For `shape`, return the selected direction to [shape.md](shape.md) and stop before persistence or implementation.

## 6. Build with full commitment

When an approved comp exists, the comp is king, and the build happens in phases. Phase one is reproduction: rebuild the comp at its own breakpoint until a screenshot at the comp's width and height overlaps it near pixel-perfectly, materials, components, elevation, assets, and implied design language included. Exactly three concessions exist: fonts (the closest obtainable face), icons (exact match unless the user already chose an icon library), and genuine defects in the generated comp such as spelling errors. Everything else must match, and models systematically believe their HTML, CSS, and SVG recreation succeeded when it did not, so the overlap comparison is the authority, never your conviction: set the screenshot beside the comp at identical dimensions after every region, and when a region keeps losing that comparison, stop recreating it in code and produce it as a rendered asset composited into the page. Only when reproduction holds does phase two begin: static regions that should live become animated or interactive, reveals and motion are added, then responsiveness across the surface's devices. Where the comp does not cover the whole surface, continue building the remainder inside the comp's recorded world and design language; a component the comp never shows inherits the recorded system's corner language, line weights, and materials, and may not introduce container styles, border weights, or chrome the comp never uses.

Build the assigned direction, not a safer interpretation of it. The form supplies structure, reading order, component conventions, and native motion; the product supplies every fact. Commit every atom: nav, buttons, inputs, and links are rebuilt in the form's vocabulary, and a stock component inside a committed form is a lapse. Land the first build fully committed; committing is the hard part, and the passes that follow exist to make the committed thing clear and effective, never to dilute it. In unattended work, the safe rendition is the known risk.

- **The first viewport is a thesis, not a header.** Demonstrate the mechanism immediately, at the scale the form has in life; do not trap the concept inside a standard hero or card shell. The memory test: if someone left after one viewport, what would they describe an hour later? If the honest answer is a mood, the concept has not committed yet.
- **Prove the hero before building past it.** When an approved comp exists, render the first viewport, capture it, and set it beside the comp's first viewport before any later section: the hero carries the run's ambition, and every following section inherits its shortfall. Judge scale and density as quantities, a field at a tenth of the comp's coverage or type at half its weight is a different design, and a five-minute retry here is what a rebuild verdict at the finish costs when this check is skipped.
- **Prove, don't claim.** Show the subject doing its job: the interface at work, the mechanism dramatized, specifics a competitor could not copy-paste. Sections that restate a claim in different words add length, not substance. Demonstration data is design material: author it at full fidelity and label it synthetic; claims stay uninventable.
- **Author the assets; never substitute chrome.** Great surfaces live on carefully made content: names, entries, copy, covers, thumbnails, textures. In greenfield work every blank the ask round left open is yours to author at production fidelity; content is authorable, claims are labelable, no section is omittable. An unanswered commercial claim ships as a clearly marked placeholder on the user's replacement list. When image generation exists, producing the design's imagery is part of building, at the scale the composition needs: a viewport that wants atmosphere gets a full-bleed layered scene, and a library of small centered subjects standardized for tidiness forecloses it. Gradients, glass, and generic icon tiles where an authored asset belongs are the gap wearing chrome; icons drawn in the world's own grammar are the remedy, not the target.
- **Build the form's web leverage.** When the chosen world names a technique (canvas, WebGL, view transitions, generative motion), build the technique itself, not a static imitation of it; the graceful fallback serves constrained clients, it is not the default experience.
- **Pace the scroll like a studio.** Vary density, scale, image, motion, and quiet inside one grammar; a dense passage earns a quiet one, and the page ends anchored by a real close. One spacing rhythm throughout, with more space above a heading than below it.
- **Use real, verified imagery when the brief implies it.** Search for the subject's physical object rather than the category; one decisive photo beats five mediocre ones. Verify stock URLs resolve.
- **Author motion as material.** The form has native motion, what it does in life between states; give the page that motion once, orchestrated, rather than scattered hover effects. Bound expensive effects and keep content visible by default.

Preserve semantics, accessibility, performance, responsiveness, project conventions, and working behavior.

## 7. Inspect and finish

Inspect desktop and mobile in one batched screenshot round, critique the render against the user's request and the direction contract, fix material gaps, and confirm with one final round; two rounds is the ceiling, and fixes batch between them rather than earning per-tweak screenshots. When an approved comp exists, the critique is a side-by-side: view the comp region and the build region together, the hero and each section as its own crop at legible scale, never one full-page thumbnail, which hides exactly the failures that matter, crude controls, wrong lettering character, flattened material, behind a superficially similar section order. On a Persuade surface, verify the mode did its job: a first-time visitor should know what this is, why it matters, and what to do within seconds, in the form's own vocabulary.

After the second inspection round the build thread's polishing is over: no further defect hunts, micro-edit scripts, or rebuilds here; whatever remains ships through the handoffs, where a fresh context does the finding better and cheaper. Where this harness runs no design hook, run `node .claude/skills/impeccable/scripts/detect.mjs --json` on the changed targets once here, fix what is mechanical, and pass the remaining findings to the reviewer; a hookless build that skips this ships every tell the hook exists to catch. Capture desktop and mobile screenshots to files, then spawn the shipped finish reviewer, `impeccable-finish-reviewer` (`impeccable_finish_reviewer` in codex; `/impeccable-finish-reviewer` in Cursor; on GitHub Copilot say "Use the impeccable-finish-reviewer agent"), with the original request, confirmed answers, the artifact path, the screenshot paths, its direction contract, existing hook findings, the QUALITY BAR card and approved comp paths, and the craft-floor reference path. The reviewer has no browser; screenshots you fail to pass are checks it cannot run. Never read the shipped agents' definition files before spawning; the harness loads them at spawn, and you owe only the input packet. Wait on any agent with one long timeout rather than a loop of short polls, and spend the wait on the next independent step. Verify its return carries the five contract sections; on an empty or thrashed return, respawn once with the same inputs before doing anything else. This review never runs inside the build thread and never inherits it: spawn the reviewer fresh, with no forked conversation history (`fork_turns: 0` in codex); a reviewer that inherits your transcript inherits your framing, your optimism, and your abstractions, and everything it needs travels in the inputs above. Only a harness whose tool surface has no subagent capability at all substitutes a fresh in-thread pass after stepping fully out of the build context, run from [degraded/finish-reviewer.md](degraded/finish-reviewer.md), and a substituted or failed-and-replaced review is disclosed in one line at finish, never silently. When the reviewer's first material fix is a rebuild directive, fidelity failed wholesale rather than in patches, so skip the fix batch and execute the rebuild immediately: re-derive the named regions, produce the named assets, and send the result back for a verdict, telling the user what is happening rather than asking permission to fix a failure. The user is consulted only when a second rebuild directive arrives, both verdicts on the table, or when rebuilding would discard content the user approved. Otherwise apply the material fixes in one batch, rebuild once, and recapture the same viewports. A recapture measures positions, loading, and overflow; it cannot measure whether a fix reached the quality the finding named, so send the recaptured screenshots back to the same reviewer for a verdict scoring every material fix resolved, partial, or unresolved (through the harness's agent continuation; without one, run the scoring fresh from [degraded/finish-reviewer.md](degraded/finish-reviewer.md)'s Verdict Pass). Fixes scored partial or unresolved get another batch, recapture, and verdict. Two rounds is the budget an unattended run ends at; an attended session's ceiling belongs to the user, so when the second verdict still lists open items, put the table in front of them and let them choose between shipping as it stands and funding another round. Whoever is deciding, stop the moment a round resolves nothing, and the reviewer's findings are the only list you work from, never your own re-opened hunt. Report the final verdict table to the user as it stands, open items included, under the reviewer's own disposition word: a table with open material findings is never announced as a pass, and never under a softer label than the reviewer wrote. Do not run a second detector.

Then spawn the shipped documenter, `impeccable-documenter` (`impeccable_documenter` in codex), with the project root, the artifact path, the direction contract, PRODUCT.md, the [document.md](document.md) reference path, and the boundary to write at; it records DESIGN.md and the sidecar from the built world, ground truth over intention; without subagents the pass runs from [degraded/documenter.md](degraded/documenter.md). A clean detector pass is not finished; finished is the contract kept, the comp honored, the review closed, and the system recorded.
