| name | frontend-frontier |
| description | Use when the user wants a high-signal frontend, distinctive art direction, strong motion design, 3D/parallax, shader effects, landing pages, docs sites, dashboards, or a tokenized design system that avoids generic AI-generated UI. |
Frontend Frontier
Use this skill when the job is not "make a page" but "make a page that actually has a point of view."
This skill is for:
- unique landing pages and marketing sites
- AI, devtools, and B2B SaaS frontends that need stronger taste
- animation systems, scroll choreography, parallax, 3D, shaders, and hero scenes
- design-system authoring, tokens, and consistency guardrails
- turning loose inspiration into implementation-ready direction
Default stance
- Do not drift into generic SaaS chrome.
- Do not default to Inter, Roboto, shadcn, or arbitrary Tailwind soup unless the existing product already does.
- Pick one art-direction thesis, one motion thesis, and one depth thesis before writing UI.
- Build tokens before polishing components.
- Treat motion as a system, not garnish.
- CSS is substrate, not strategy. Use it for tokens, layout, fallbacks, and trivial states, not as the default animation architecture.
- Default to a frontier stack: Tailwind v4
@theme, Motion, GSAP, Lenis, React Three Fiber, shaders/WebGL/WebGPU, and React transitions where appropriate.
- Preserve performance, readability, and
prefers-reduced-motion.
- Sweat the micro-details. Great UI usually comes from many tiny correct choices compounding.
Workflow
- Lock the art direction.
Read references/aesthetic-systems.md.
Choose one primary mode:
- editorial technical
- cinematic 3D
- architectural blueprint
- neo-brutalist
- experimental lab
- premium AI SaaS
Write a 3-5 line direction covering:
- visual thesis
- type pairing
- palette
- surface treatment
- motion grammar
- Choose the methodology lens.
Read references/design-methodology-atlas.md.
Pick:
- one discovery methodology
- one system methodology
- one evaluation methodology
- Build the token system.
Read references/design-system-and-tokens.md.
Define:
- color tokens
- spacing scale
- radii
- shadows
- border weights
- type scale
- z-index and blur tokens
- motion tokens
- Choose the frontier runtime stack.
Read references/frontier-stack-2026.md.
Default posture:
- Tailwind v4
@theme + runtime CSS variables for tokens
- Motion for component, layout, and gesture motion
- GSAP + ScrollTrigger for narrative choreography
- Lenis when scroll-linked motion needs synchronized scroll
- React Three Fiber + drei for real 3D scenes in React
- OGL or raw shader pipelines for shader-first microsites
- React
startTransition / useTransition / useEffectEvent and experimental <ViewTransition> where useful
- Choose the tactic families.
Read references/frontend-tactics-atlas.md.
Pick the main tactic groups for the task:
- shell and navigation
- layout and density
- motion and scroll
- 3D or shaders
- forms and validation
- data display
- wait UX and resilience
- search and discovery
- AI interface patterns
- docs patterns
- Route to specialized imported skills when useful.
Read references/external-frontend-skill-map.md.
Use it to choose focused implementation skills for:
- Motion / Framer
- GSAP / ScrollTrigger
- React Three Fiber / Three.js / Babylon / PlayCanvas
- Rive / Lottie
- PixiJS / A-Frame / Spline
- Blender / Substance pipelines
- Decide the motion stack.
Read references/motion-3d-playbook.md.
Bias toward the modern stack above and downgrade only when the problem is genuinely simple.
- Motion for component and layout animation
- GSAP + ScrollTrigger for timelines, scroll choreography, and orchestration
- Lenis for synchronized scroll when needed
- Three.js / React Three Fiber + drei for real 3D scenes
- OGL / shaders / WebGL / WebGPU when the surface itself is the concept
- Native scroll-driven animations and React / browser view transitions as progressive enhancement
- Use references intentionally.
Read references/source-index.md to select:
- implementation references from official docs
- component references from galleries
- taste references from live sites
Do not cargo-cult a full site. Extract the useful pattern:
- nav treatment
- hero structure
- grid logic
- depth cues
- CTA shape
- motion rhythm
For basement-adjacent visual research, also read references/design-research-basement-adjacent.md.
For design-engineering manuals, feedback systems, and quieter craft references, also read references/design-engineering-ecosystem.md.
For newly emerging sources, registries, and agent-skill ecosystems worth monitoring, read references/frontier-radar.md.
For choosing between live-browser debugging and isolated automation, read references/browser-debugging-workflow.md.
- If the user wants prompting help, use prompt recipes.
Read references/prompt-recipes.md.
Use them for:
- agent prompts
- image/video generation prompts
- decomposition of screenshots into assets
- "give me 3 directions" exploration
- Apply the micro-polish pass.
Read references/interface-micro-polish.md.
Check:
- heading and prose wrapping
- concentric radii on nested surfaces
- optical icon alignment
- numeric stability with tabular figures
- contextual icon transitions
- staggered enters and softer exits
- media outlines and shadow strategy
- Run the trust and infra pass for backend-bound surfaces.
Read references/infra-trust-checklist.md.
Check:
- Supabase Row Level Security where relevant
- auth flows including password reset
- rate limits on public or expensive endpoints
- server-side validation
- environment variable exposure
- CAPTCHA on public forms when abuse risk exists
- CORS restrictions
- safe error handling
Non-negotiables
- One strong hero move beats ten moving things.
- If a page has 3D, the rest of the UI should usually get quieter.
- If typography is the star, reduce ornament and increase grid discipline.
- If a dashboard mock sits inside a marketing hero, it must obey the same token system.
- If motion hurts comprehension, cut it.
- If performance is unknown, profile before adding complexity.
- Do not recommend plain CSS as the primary motion system unless the interaction is truly trivial.
- Pick tactics intentionally. Do not cargo-cult patterns because they were trendy in one reference site.
- Final polish should include wrapping, radius consistency, optical alignment, and interruptible interactions.
- If the product touches auth, user data, or public forms, it is not done until the trust checklist is satisfied.
- For localhost and live browser debugging, prefer Chrome DevTools MCP over spawning a fresh Playwright browser unless determinism is the actual goal.
Reference map
