design-lens — Eight Lenses for Great Design

design-lens

Eight lenses for great design — an auto-invoked decision-and-critique framework for Claude Code.

Turns a vague "make it good" into concrete, defensible decisions. Fires whenever design quality matters — on any platform, even when nobody says the word "design."

Why this exists

"Make it look good" is the least actionable instruction in software. It has no edges — nothing to build toward, nothing to check against. So an agent guesses, you correct, it guesses again.

design-lens replaces the guess with a frame. Eight lenses turn the fuzzy ask into a set of working questions with right answers: What is this for, and what can be cut? Can people undo it? Am I asking for that permission at the right moment? Does this detail say someone cared? Each lens is a place to look, a failure mode to avoid, and a line you can defend in review.

It's a skill, so it loads itself. The moment you're shaping how something looks, behaves, or feels to a person, Claude pulls the lenses in — no command to remember, no principle to recite.

The eight lenses

They aren't a scorecard. There's no formula — leaning into one often costs another (simple vs. flexible, freedom vs. safety). Naming that trade-off and choosing on purpose is the design work.

What it does, concretely

• Designing something new → runs the lenses forward, Purpose first (what's core, what's cut), Delight as the through-line — not a final garnish.
• Reviewing / critiquing (including UI code review) → runs a self-audit and reports concrete gaps tied to a specific lens, highest-leverage fix first — never vague "make it nicer."
• A single decision → jumps to the lens that owns it. "Should we add this?" → Purpose + Responsibility + Simplicity. "How do we ask for location?" → Responsibility. "Destructive action?" → Agency.
• "Make it premium" → Craft + Simplicity + Familiarity + Delight, as the bar to critique against.

Install

# In Claude Code:
/plugin marketplace add realdeal88/design-lens
/plugin install design-lens

That's it. The skill auto-invokes from then on. To confirm it's loaded, ask Claude to "review this screen against the design lenses" — it should run the eight-lens self-audit.

git clone https://github.com/realdeal88/design-lens
cp -r design-lens/skills/design-lens ~/.claude/skills/

What's in the box

design-lens/
├── skills/design-lens/
│   ├── SKILL.md                      # the working tool — eight lenses, usage modes, self-audit
│   └── references/
│       └── design-principles.md      # the deep reference — each lens expanded with failure modes
└── .claude-plugin/
    ├── plugin.json                   # plugin manifest
    └── marketplace.json              # single-repo marketplace

SKILL.md is what loads on trigger. references/design-principles.md is pulled only when a decision needs more than the one-line lens — keeping the always-on footprint small.

Design it as a discipline, not a vibe