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aestheticsSkills

Type Is Not a Delivery Vehicle

SHOULD

SHOULD: Use distinctive, characterful fonts instead of generic defaults (Inter, Roboto, Arial). Pair a display font with a refined body font for memorable visual identity.

Choose typefaces with character instead of the current default families, and make the type treatment itself memorable

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Generic fonts are everywhere — safe, and forgettable. The monoculture also moves: the tell is no longer just Arial/Inter/Roboto but the newer default wave — Geist, Plus Jakarta Sans, Space Grotesk, Instrument Sans/Serif, Mona Sans, Fraunces, Recoleta. Reaching for one of those because it is the current "tasteful" pick is the same reflex, one cycle later. Upstream frames the test as subject-derived: the typeface should come from the product's own world, not from whatever is trending in the training distribution.

References

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.