frontend-design-direction

Choose an explicit design direction before coding: define the interface's purpose, audience, tone, one memorable detail, and constraints. Avoid default generated patterns like purple gradients, decorative blobs, oversized cards, and vague hero copy.

Match the direction to the domain and workflow. A SaaS operations tool should be dense, quiet, and scannable, while a portfolio or launch page can be more expressive. Build the usable experience as the first screen rather than marketing sections.

No. ECC intentionally does not rebundle the canonical Anthropic frontend-design skill. Install that from anthropics/skills for the official upstream version; this skill is ECC-specific salvaged guidance from community PR #1659.

Avoid purple gradients, decorative blobs, cards nested inside cards, single-hue palettes, generic marketing sections hiding the product, and new dependencies added only for visual flourishes. Let controls speak for themselves instead of describing features inside the UI.

Avoid expressive, landing-page-style compositions for tools used repeatedly every day, such as operations dashboards. Restraint, stable layouts, and scannable hierarchy serve repeated workflows better than decorative maximalism.