UI Design & Frontend Skills

Derive a full UI colour palette algorithmically from one or two brand colours. Darker and lighter variants for interactive states, desaturated greys from the brand hue for borders and backgrounds, and semantic colours that feel coherent with the brand rather than generic. Use when building a colour system from scratch or expanding a limited brand palette for UI use.

Product visuals — hero shots, demos, screenshots, landing-page panels — must reproduce the real product, not a stylised poster of it. Design with real content and real data, mirror the actual output the product generates, keep every label and number truthful, and refuse fabricated marketing chrome. Use when building landing pages, hero sections, product screenshots, demo panels, or any visual that stands in for the real thing.

A brand's visual tone — playful or serious, rounded or angular — should be consistent across all UI elements. Shape language in typography, border-radius, and iconography communicates personality before a single word is read. Use when establishing a design system, choosing icon libraries, setting border-radius tokens, or reviewing visual consistency.

Every interactive element needs a complete set of visual states — rest, hover, active/pressed, focus, disabled, and loading. States should be derived algorithmically from the base colour, not chosen arbitrarily. Use when designing buttons, links, inputs, or any clickable component.

Choose light, dark, or combined color mode deliberately based on brand tone and user context. Offer a theme selector only when user control genuinely matters — enterprise tools, data-heavy UIs, or extended-use applications. Use when defining the base color palette, designing a design system, or deciding whether to build dark mode support.

Buttons, inputs, pills, badges, calendars, and other interactive components form a visual family — they share the same border-radius, colour logic, shadow scale, border style, and spacing rhythm. Inconsistency between them breaks the sense of a coherent product. Use when building or reviewing a component library, design system, or any set of UI components.

When data has both a tabular/list representation and a visual representation, show both simultaneously and keep them synchronized. Clicking a row highlights the corresponding element in the visual view, and vice versa. Applies to maps, diagrams, timelines, and charts that accompany a data table. Use when designing any UI where data appears in two different representations at once.

Complex data deserves multiple view modes — grid, list, table — chosen by the user based on their task. Row and item selection should use large hit areas (the whole row or card, not just a checkbox). Selected state is communicated through a subtle background colour shift. Mass actions appear when items are selected. Use when designing data tables, product listings, file browsers, or any multi-item collection.

Orchestrates a multi-dimensional UI/UX task through the full dembrandt design pipeline (brand → tokens → layout → components → UX polish → accessibility/performance gate), loading the right sub-skill at each stage. Use when designing or reviewing a non-trivial UI (a screen, flow, or design system), going from brand to UI end-to-end, or auditing an existing interface across multiple dimensions. Do NOT use for single-dimension tasks (e.g. "review my color palette" — load algorithmic-color-palette directly).

Configuration UIs for domain experts — users who understand their field deeply but are not software developers — require domain language, sensible defaults, and grouping by professional concept rather than technical parameter. Use when designing settings panels, solver or algorithm configuration, constraint editors, or any UI where the user needs to tune the behaviour of a complex system without understanding its internals.

Elevation — subtle shadows and layering — communicates visual hierarchy by lifting elements above the surface. Combined with border-radius, it creates the tactile quality of cards, modals, and interactive surfaces. Use when designing cards, dropdowns, modals, tooltips, or any floating UI element.

Extract a complete design system — colors, typography, spacing, components, shadows, and W3C design tokens — from any live website using Dembrandt. Runs a headless browser against the URL and returns real computed values from the DOM. Use when you need a site's actual design tokens, want to reverse-engineer a visual design, or need to seed a design system from an existing product.

Build accessible, user-friendly forms with validation. Covers react-hook-form, Zod schemas, error handling UX, multi-step forms, input patterns, and form accessibility. Use for registration forms, checkout flows, data entry, and user input.

Pipeline skill — turns a URL or DESIGN.md into a concrete UI structure with decisions already made. Extracts live design tokens, normalizes them into a semantic system, applies UX principles, and outputs an actionable UI spec. Use when building UI for an existing brand from scratch, auditing a design system, or refactoring visual inconsistency.

UI layout and grouping should follow Gestalt principles so users immediately understand which controls, commands, and elements belong together. Use when designing or reviewing component layout, navigation, toolbars, forms, dashboards, or any UI where visual grouping communicates relationships.

Quick global settings — currency, language, region, units — belong in a persistent, low-profile location such as a header toolbar or footer. These controls are frequent but not primary, so they use small typography and stay out of the main content hierarchy. Use when designing global selectors, locale switchers, or user preference controls that apply across the whole product.

A layout is not a neutral container — choosing the right layout paradigm (feed, board, table, canvas, master-detail, dashboard, gallery, timeline, map, single-focus) is a design decision that shapes how content is understood. Once chosen, the same paradigm and page skeleton must be reused consistently across the application so users build one mental model. This is consistency at the macro scale, above component and token consistency. Use when deciding the overall structure of a screen, designing page templates, or reviewing whether screens across a product feel like one coherent application.

Manage user expectations during wait times with appropriate loading states — from simple spinners to complex skeleton screens and staggered animations. Perceived performance is often more important than actual load time. Use when designing data-heavy components, handling API calls, building hero sections, or improving the feel of a slow interface.

Micro-interactions are small, purposeful animations and responses that reward the user and make the interface feel alive — an animated icon, a satisfying toggle, a subtle reveal. Borrowed from the natural world, they add delight without distraction. Use when designing interactive components, success states, toggles, loaders, or any moment worth celebrating.

Overlays — modals, drawers, bottom sheets, popovers — interrupt or augment the main flow. Each type has a different scope, blocking level, and appropriate use case. Use when designing dialogs, confirmation prompts, side panels, action sheets, or any UI element that appears above the main content layer.

Typography feels cohesive and intentional when font sizes follow a modular scale — a ratio-based sequence where every size is mathematically related to the others. Use when defining type scales, setting up design tokens, reviewing font size choices, or when typography feels inconsistent or arbitrary.

Disney's 12 animation principles, cinematic storytelling techniques, and comic book conventions apply to web UI — used subtly, they make interfaces feel alive, intentional, and emotionally resonant. Use when designing transitions, micro-interactions, onboarding flows, scroll animations, or any motion in the UI.

UI design and review should apply Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics — the foundational principles for evaluating and improving usability. Use when auditing an interface, designing interaction flows, writing error messages, or reviewing any UI for usability issues.

When something goes wrong, the user must be able to recover or try again. Toasts, inline errors, banners, and notification patterns each have a specific role. Use when designing error states, success confirmations, async feedback, in-place editing, or any system that communicates state changes to the user.