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design@Ibelick

Don't Use Glow as Affordance

NEVER

NEVER: Use glow effects (box-shadow with blur and color) as primary affordances. Glows are decorative, not functional. Use borders or backgrounds for affordance.

Never rely on glow effects as the primary indicator for interactive elements

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Verbatim from the baseline-ui skill — one line under "Design". Our reasoning: a glow is a soft, low-contrast halo, which is precisely the wrong material for the one job an affordance has, namely being unmistakable. It washes out in sunlight, renders differently on every panel, and is invisible to anyone who cannot perceive the hue it is made of. If a glow is the only thing marking a control as interactive, the control has no marking.

Carry the affordance on something structural — a border, a fill, a shape, a label — and treat glow as ornament layered on top, never as the signal itself. The same applies to focus: a glow is not a focus ring.

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.