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aestheticsSkills

Do Not Converge Across Generations

SHOULD

SHOULD: Never converge on common choices. Vary themes (light/dark), fonts (serif/sans/mono), and aesthetics across designs. Avoid using Space Grotesk, Inter, or blue accents on every project. Each design should have a distinct personality.

Vary theme, type, and direction between projects instead of re-running the one look you happen to be good at

Bad

Good

Why it matters

A model with no memory reproduces its best-rehearsed look every time, which is how ten different briefs end up with the same dark canvas and the same grotesk. Upstream's counter-move is memory: "Human creators have memory and always try to do something new, so if you have a space to quickly jot down notes about what you've tried, it can help you in future passes." Keep that note file, read it before you start, and deliberately spend this project on the axis you did not spend last time.

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.