| name | art-direction |
| description | Imagery, illustration, and iconography direction for web UI. Use for hero images, photo treatment, illustration style, icon sets, favicons, OG/social cards, decorative graphics, image-shaped holes, and removing generic AI imagery. |
Art Direction
Art direction gives imagery a job in the interface: orient, explain, establish trust, or create a controlled emotional cue. It is not a list of visual adjectives.
Set the visual job before selecting assets
Write a one-line stance: audience, moment, desired response, and what imagery must communicate that copy cannot. Then choose one primary treatment and one fallback. A treatment can be documentary detail, diagrammatic illustration, editorial crop, icon system, or deliberately no image.
| Decision | Specify | Reject when |
|---|
| Subject | people, object, place, or abstract concept | it repeats the headline without adding evidence |
| Point of view | distance, angle, energy, inclusion | it turns a serious task into decoration |
| Composition | focal zone, text-safe area, responsive crop | the message disappears at narrow widths |
| Surface | palette, texture, line weight, lighting | it conflicts with product semantic states |
| Rights | source, license, attribution, expiry | ownership or reuse is unknown |
Turn the stance into an asset contract
For each proposed asset, record its source, allowed use, focal subject, crop anchors for wide and narrow layouts, overlay treatment, and alt decision. If no approved library exists, deliver a search brief or commissioning brief—not fabricated filenames or claimed licenses.
- Make the narrow crop independently legible; do not assume a desktop crop merely shrinks.
- Reserve readable text space in the composition before applying an overlay.
- Prefer a coherent series over unrelated stock images. Inclusion must be credible to the subject and setting.
- Use decorative alt only when removing the image loses no task-relevant information. Otherwise state the information in concise alt text or adjacent copy.
Prove it in the rendered layout
Show one wide and one narrow composition with the real headline, navigation, and state colors present. Check that focal content survives crops, overlays preserve text contrast, repeated cards do not create visual noise, and icons remain distinguishable at their rendered size.
Deliver a small treatment board with: stance, primary/fallback treatment, two representative assets or search terms, crop notes, rights status, alt strategy, and the reject criterion. Treat source URLs, licenses, and approval status as evidence—not ornamental credits.
Use decision records when competing treatments require a documented trade-off.
Favicons and app icons
Ship an SVG favicon primary (<link rel="icon" href="/favicon.svg" type="image/svg+xml">)
with a PNG fallback. Derive the mark from the committed stance; test legibility at 16×16
actual pixels — a single bold glyph outperforms a detailed logo. Apple Touch Icon (180),
manifest icons (192/512), and OG preview are separate deliverables with their own crop and
contrast needs. See patterns for worked examples.
Ship check
Contract (generated)
Canonical detail: contract.json.
- Route: A product needs a committed imagery, illustration, or iconography system with source and rights decisions.; avoid: The request is only a color, type, or layout decision.
- Exclude: Do not use placeholder imagery when the brief requires a real asset plan. (+1 in contract.json)
- Stop / handoff: Stop when source or rights constraints cannot be verified. (+1 in contract.json); receives [design-system-interview, improve-existing-website, tasteroll] -> sends [responsive-layout, a11y-pass, deslop-ui, tastecheck-pass]
- Output: source-aware visual treatment and asset plan
- Evidence:
table_with_evidence with status, reason, remediation, evidence, provenance.
