Skip to main content

Search rules

Search all UI Guides rules by name, category, or source

aestheticsSkills

Defaults Are Not Choices

NEVER

NEVER: Use generic fonts (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system-ui), purple gradients, perfectly centered layouts, excessive border-radius, or sparkle emojis. These are hallmarks of AI-generated slop. Choose distinctive typography, intentional colors, and layouts with asymmetry.

The reflexive AI looks are legitimate only when the brief asks for them — never spend a free axis on one

Bad

Good

Why it matters

The diagnostic is not "is this look bad" — cream, near-black-and-acid, and broadsheet are all fine designs for the right subject. The diagnostic is "did the subject produce this, or did the model?" If the same palette and layout would have arrived for a fintech dashboard, a wellness app, and a dev tool alike, it came from the training distribution. Our corpus pins the individual looks: `aesthetics-impeccable-cream-palette` (1), `aesthetics-dark-acid-default` (2).

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.