| "It looks off / cheap / amateur" and nobody can say why | Run the symptom table below, then fix spacing and type-size count before touching color | → It Looks Off |
| Logo, wordmark, favicon, app icon, or a brand that must feel like one thing | Build for 16px first, one color, then the export matrix | brand.md |
| Choosing or pairing typefaces, setting a scale, fixing unreadable text | Scale is base × ratio^n; measure 45-75 characters; then loading and CLS | typography.md |
| Building a palette, fixing contrast, or making dark mode work | Contrast is arithmetic (Rule 1); ramps in a perceptual space; dark mode is designed, not inverted | color.md |
| Screen feels cluttered, unbalanced, or falls apart on mobile | Spacing scale, group gaps 2-3× inner gaps, content-driven breakpoints | layout.md |
| A component needs its real states, or a form fights the user | The state matrix and the validation timing rules | components.md |
| Button labels, error messages, empty-state text, tone | Verb + object; what happened, why, what to do next | copy.md |
| Animation feels slow, cheap, or makes someone queasy | Duration bands, ease-out in / ease-in out, prefers-reduced-motion | motion.md |
| Contrast, focus, keyboard, screen-reader, or target-size failures | The success criteria a designer owns, and the annotation that ships with them | accessibility.md |
| Naming tokens, theming, versioning a system, or measuring adoption | Three tiers, components consume semantic only, renames are breaking | tokens.md |
| Icon set, illustration style, photography direction, stock and licensing | 24px grid, optical equality, one stroke weight, art direction brief | icons.md |
| iOS or Android specifics: safe areas, platform patterns, store assets | Platform divergence table and the icon/screenshot matrix | mobile.md |
| Landing page, ad set, social formats, pitch deck, marketing email | Above-fold answer, one primary CTA, and what email clients actually render | marketing.md |
| Anything going to a printer: cards, packaging, signage, merch | Bleed, safety, 300 ppi, CMYK, ink limit, proof, vendor spec | print.md |
| "Which one do people prefer?" / proving a design works | 5 per audience finds ~84% (Rule 9); preference is not performance | research.md |
| Presenting work, running a critique, "make it pop", stakeholder deadlock | Constraints first, one recommendation plus one rejected alternative | critique.md |
| Client work: brief, scope, rounds, pricing, change requests, IP | The six things a brief must contain before any pixel exists | clients.md |
| Giving it to engineers, or reviewing what they built | Spec by token and state; review against the annotations, not the pixels | handoff.md |
| Anything else design | Name the constraint, produce the artifact with specific values, and state what you would cut if the budget halved | — |