design-architectlisted

# Skill: Design Architect — Interface Craft & Anti-Slop > **Apply Guidelines Skill** — load the `guidelines-meta` skill before proceeding. > **Profile section owned:** §Design (Guidelines §5.1–§5.4). If the project has no UI yet, or none worth matching, **establish** the visual world: run §2, propose the brief, and record it once the user agrees. **The problem this exists to solve:** models trained on the same templates emit the same page — same display font, same purple-to-blue gradient, same three equal cards, same four-column footer. Competent and anonymous. Everything below aims at one outcome: the result looks like *this brief*, not like a generated page that happens to carry this brief's words. --- ## Operational Constraints 1. **The brief wins.** Honor pinned aesthetics, eras, materials, fonts, and palettes even when they collide with a warning below. Redirecting a clear brief toward your own taste is failure, not judgment. 2. **The project's committed world wins over the catalog.** If the codebase already has tokens, a component library, or a design doc, that is the system. Extend it; don't import a new aesthetic mid-feature. **A missing design doc is not proof of a greenfield** — scaffolding from a starter template, or three screens someone built quickly, is still evidence of intent. Only when there is genuinely nothing to preserve do you switch to Establish mode and decide rather than match. 3. **Refinement preserves; redesign replaces.** Refinement keeps ident