Design Consultation — Workflow

Overview

How the design-consultation skill works, step by step.

Source Workflow

Claude skill workflow.

Step-by-step Workflow

design-consultation — Workflow

Auto-generated from SKILL.md. The skill itself is the source of truth; this is a human-readable map of what it does and how it runs.

What it does & when to use

Design consultation: understands your product, researches the landscape, proposes a complete design system (aesthetic, typography, color, layout, spacing, motion), and generates font+color preview pages. Creates DESIGN.md as your project's design source of truth. For existing sites, use /plan-design-review to infer the system instead. Use when asked to "design system", "brand guidelines", or "create DESIGN.md". Proactively suggest when starting a new project's UI with no existing design system or DESIGN.md. (gstack)

Triggers

  • design system
  • brand guidelines
  • create DESIGN.md

How it works

Workflow outline (sections of SKILL.md):

  1. Preamble (run first)
  2. Plan Mode Safe Operations
  3. Skill Invocation During Plan Mode
  4. Skill routing
  5. AskUserQuestion Format
  6. Artifacts Sync (skill start)
  7. Model-Specific Behavioral Patch (claude)
  8. Voice
  9. Context Recovery
  10. Writing Style (skip entirely if EXPLAIN_LEVEL: terse appears in the preamble echo OR the user's current message explicitly requests terse / no-explanations output)
  11. Completeness Principle — Boil the Lake
  12. Confusion Protocol
  13. Continuous Checkpoint Mode
  14. Context Health (soft directive)
  15. Question Tuning (skip entirely if QUESTION_TUNING: false)
  16. Repo Ownership — See Something, Say Something
  17. Search Before Building
  18. Completion Status Protocol
  19. Operational Self-Improvement
  20. Telemetry (run last)
  21. Plan Status Footer
  22. Phase 0: Pre-checks
  23. SETUP (run this check BEFORE any browse command)
  24. DESIGN SETUP (run this check BEFORE any design mockup command)
  25. Prior Learnings
  26. Phase 1: Product Context
  27. Phase 2: Research (only if user said yes)
  28. Design Outside Voices (parallel)
  29. Phase 3: The Complete Proposal
  30. Phase 4: Drill-downs (only if user requests adjustments)
  31. Phase 5: Design System Preview (default ON)
  32. Phase 6: Write DESIGN.md & Confirm
  33. Product Context
  34. Aesthetic Direction
  35. Typography
  36. Color
  37. Spacing
  38. Layout
  39. Motion
  40. Decisions Log
  41. Design System
  42. Capture Learnings
  43. Important Rules

Components

Single-file skill — all instructions live in SKILL.md.

Invoke

  • Slash: /design-consultation
  • Or a natural-language request matching the triggers above.

Source: SKILL.md in this directory.

Execution Logic

The skill executes when its trigger fires (slash command, natural-language match, or direct invocation). It reads its references, applies its rules, and produces the documented outputs.

Edge Cases

See the source skill's references/ and scripts/ folders for edge-case handling.

Failure Handling

A skill failure surfaces as a tool error or a partial output; never a silent skip. Re-run with --verbose (where applicable) for diagnostics.

Integration Notes

  • Claude — invoked via the Skill tool with skill: "design-consultation".
  • Codex — referenced from AGENTS.md if mirrored.
  • Antigravity — referenced from the workspace agent rules if mirrored.
  • HQ Project — listed on the landing page Skills section + post-login sidebar.
  • MD Project (md.sgnk.ai) — file rendered from Skills/Design Consultation/workflow.md.
  • Obsidian — file rendered with frontmatter + tags.

Usage Examples

Invoke via slash command or natural language matching the skill description.

Source: ~/.claude/skills/design-consultation/WORKFLOW.md