design-taste-frontend

Start by inferring the design direction from the brief: page kind, audience, vibe words, and references. Then set variance, motion, and density dials, pick an appropriate design system or aesthetic family, and audit the output against anti-default rules before shipping.

For modern SaaS marketing sites, Tailwind v4 utilities with the dark variant are the default, or shadcn/ui when you want to own the components. Enterprise briefs map to official systems like Fluent, Carbon, or Material instead of hand-rolled CSS.

Yes, Next.js with React Server Components and Tailwind v4 is the default stack. For Tailwind v4 it uses @tailwindcss/postcss or the Vite plugin, and animations use the motion/react package with interactive components isolated as client leaves.

Serif is discouraged as a default and only appropriate when the brand brief names a serif or the aesthetic is genuinely editorial, luxury, or heritage. For creative agencies, portfolios, and premium consumer brands, sans-serif display faces like Geist Display or Cabinet Grotesk are the correct default.

Models default to recognizable patterns: purple gradients, centered heroes, three equal feature cards, Inter font, and an eyebrow label above every section. Avoiding this requires deliberate brief reading, palette rotation, layout family diversification, and mechanical pre-flight checks on the output.

It is scoped to landing pages, portfolios, and redesigns, not dashboards, data tables, or multi-step product UI. It also does not invent CSS for systems with official packages and treats aesthetics like Apple Liquid Glass as web approximations rather than official implementations.